Funny Girl(59)

The episode, ‘The Speech’, hadn’t been one of the best, to Dennis’s regret. It had been a good idea: Jim is asked to deliver a lecture at his old Oxford college. Barbara listens to the speech, chimes in with a few improvements and then decides to accompany him. When she gets there she antagonizes and then charms Jim’s old tutor. Dennis hadn’t directed it well, he didn’t think. There was no fluidity, the college room was unconvincing and the tutor had been miscast. But that wasn’t the point. Vernon Whitfield would have hated the best episodes.

‘The studio audience were in stitches.’

‘Yes, well,’ said Whitfield. ‘I don’t know where they find the people who turn up for those things.’

‘We don’t have to find them,’ said Dennis. ‘They apply for tickets. They come from all over the country, in coaches.’

‘I’m sure they do,’ said Whitfield.

‘They’re ordinary people.’

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ said Whitfield. ‘That’s what troubles me.’

Finally, Dennis felt a hunger for the fight that he’d been invited to have. They were normal, the people who dragged themselves out to see Barbara (and Jim) every Sunday night; or rather, they were, as far as he could tell, reasonably representative of the millions of people who watched it on television. Sometimes Dennis sat at the end of a row and listened to the conversations around him. He heard talk about the journey, about work, about the desperation for a cup of tea or a smoke. And sometimes he heard lines – sometimes misremembered but always quoted with enthusiasm – or synopses of past episodes, offered to viewers who had often already seen them but who nodded enthusiastically anyway, and chipped in with plot snippets of their own. These people were always excited, no matter how far they had travelled. They couldn’t believe that they were about to see the real Barbara and the real Jim. Dennis didn’t know what any of them did for a living, although he was pretty sure that there wasn’t a broadcaster from the Third or a critic from the Times Literary Supplement among them. And of course he was bound to love them, because they loved the programme, but he was sure of one thing: they weren’t fools.

‘Do you not like ordinary people?’ said Dennis.

‘I love ordinary people individually,’ said Whitfield. ‘It’s ordinary people en masse that trouble me. They seem to lose the ability to think. And I’m sorry that the BBC of all organizations feels the need to talk down to them.’

‘I don’t think we’re talking down to them.’

‘Well, of course this is what we should be discussing on air. But … where are we going with all this? The BBC is full of horse-racing and variety shows and pop groups who look and sound like cavemen. What will it look like in ten years’ time? Fifty? You’re already making jokes about lavatories and God knows what. How long before you people decide it’s all right to show people taking a shit, so long as some hyena in the audience thinks it’s hysterical?’

‘I don’t think anyone wants to see anyone taking a shit,’ said Dennis.

‘Not yet,’ said Whitfield. ‘But the day will come, mark my words. You can sense it. And while I have breath in my body, I will fight it.’

‘But to sum up, you think Barbara (and Jim) is hastening the arrival of a programme called Thirty Minutes on the Crapper?’

‘I know so, dear boy.’

Dennis wondered whether he might actually be mad, and then whether he and Edith would end up killing each other, or killing themselves, perhaps while living in a nudists’ colony in Sweden.

Barry Bannister came to lead them round to the back of the set.

‘The other guests are just finishing off their review of the week,’ said Bannister. ‘They’ll sit and listen to you do your bit. Robert will ask you a couple of questions, but mostly he’s there as a facilitator. We want you to talk to each other.’

Robert Mitchell, the host of Pipe Smoke, was a man with a beard and spectacles who wrote for the weeklies and broadcast on the Third. He and two other men were talking about the death of poetry.

‘OK,’ whispered Barry. ‘They’re nearly finished. He’ll turn to you in a sec. On you go. And remember it’s live, so try and spit it out first time, eh?’

They followed him through the gap in the enormous curtain.

‘I do wish you hadn’t been sleeping with Edith,’ Dennis whispered, and they stepped into the momentarily blinding light and sat down.