Funny Girl(68)

During this series, however, the shared brain was becoming harder to find. Now they were two men yoked together by talent and circumstance, trying to speak with a single voice, and suddenly every single line and every narrative choice had to be debated, attacked, defended; both Tony and Bill won small triumphs and endured small defeats. Maybe this was how every writing partnership worked, but they’d never had to do it like this before, and it was hard.

Tony tried to think of how to break his news to Bill in a way that somehow wouldn’t invite sarcasm and scorn. Bill liked June, and they seemed to enjoy each other’s company when they met. Maybe it was Tony’s paranoia, but he couldn’t help thinking Bill looked on the marriage as bogus, an indication of cowardice and a desire to conform. Tony and Bill used to be two different shades of chalk. Now Tony was turning into a variety of cheese. It wasn’t a strong cheese, admittedly – he was probably closer in flavour to a cheese spread than to a seeping blue French thing riddled with maggots. But he was a mild married man, and even before June got pregnant the two of them had stayed in, night after night, watching television, listening to the radio, talking about what they’d seen and heard, analysing scripts. Once or twice a week, they went to the pictures, and dissected the films they saw on the way home. Tony could listen to June talking about scripts all night. She couldn’t write them – she’d tried, although she would never show Tony or anyone else the results – but she always knew where they’d gone wrong, what they were lacking, where they’d turned right when they should have turned left, why scenes were lifeless when they should have fizzed and crackled. He was beginning to wonder whether June’s facility, and their shared interest, might serve them better in the long run than a passionate sexual relationship that would eventually die on them.

Bill, however, went to clubs and bars that nobody else knew about, and drank a lot, and met wild, dangerous people who constantly ran the risk of imprisonment for their sexual preferences but who didn’t seem to care. And he was starting to look at a world beyond light entertainment, a world that Tony didn’t really understand. He went to the theatre – he had discovered Harold Pinter and N. F. Simpson and Joe Orton – and he knew Peter Cook and Dudley Moore and the people at Private Eye. He’d submitted a couple of clever, angry sketches to Ned Sherrin’s new satirical show, Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life – he’d even written something called ‘The Two-Thousand-Year-Old Homosexual Virgin’, satirizing the time it was taking to do anything about the recommendations in the Wolfenden Report. It had been turned down, but he was proud of it, and Tony got the impression that he was writing something longer which allowed him to visit the places that Barbara (and Jim) could never go. Tony admired all of it, and he wished he could be more like him, but he knew he wasn’t, and probably wouldn’t ever be.

‘Oh, f*cking hell,’ said Bill when Tony told him.

His swearing was more ostentatious these days too. He’d tried to avoid bad language when they’d started out, because he didn’t want people to think that he was some uneducated oik from Barnet. Now half the actors and writers he knew wanted to sound like uneducated oiks from Barnet, so he effed and blinded with the best of them.

‘How did that happen?’

Tony smiled sheepishly. ‘The normal way. More or less.’

‘Mr Normal,’ said Bill. ‘Mr f*cking Average.’

‘That’s me,’ said Tony.

‘You are, though, aren’t you?’

‘I don’t know, Bill. I’m a TV writer who left school at fifteen and once got arrested in an Aldershot toilet. And I’ve just found out I’m about to become a father after making love to my wife a dozen times over the entire duration of our marriage with a success rate of less than 50 per cent. Is that average?’

‘Probably better than average, that last bit.’

Tony laughed, and remembered his mother’s savage digs at his father’s expense.

‘But you’re ironing all the kinks out,’ said Bill. ‘You want to be respectable.’

‘It just happened. I haven’t tried to do any of it. And it suits me.’

‘Yeah, well. I suppose it’s good one of us is like that.’

‘Why?’

‘That’s what we’re trying to do, isn’t it? Write about Mr and Mrs Average?’

‘Yeah, she looks like Sabrina and he works for Harold Wilson.’