Funny Girl(72)

They weren’t worried about the time they had been asked to spend translating the best episodes of The Awkward Squad into the language of television. They were sure that most of the changes required would be grammatical rather than structural, and that therefore their secretary, Hazel, could do a lot of the work. Television wasn’t so different from radio, just as Spanish wasn’t so different from Italian, a joke was a joke in any language, and so on.

What they hadn’t anticipated was that The Awkward Squad had been written, not in Italian, but in Latin. Its jokes were creaky and tired and over-familiar, probably even at the time they had written them, and guiltily they began to remember how much they had borrowed from shows and comedians they admired back then. The few women they had bothered with were shrewish or stupid, and the men were unattractive, leering buffoons who, as far as they could remember, were intended to be likeable. The world had moved on, and if The Awkward Squad was ever to appear on television, it would need to be reconceived. They didn’t even know if they wanted to think about National Service any more, or if anyone else did either. It made them feel old. The Beatles had missed the army altogether. That was another country, all that. They spent a desultory couple of weeks working on a pilot episode, but to their fury and their relief, it never did get made. They suddenly found themselves with less than three weeks left to spend on Barbara (and Jim), the only thing they cared about.

This panic explained but did not excuse the first episode of the third series, their attempt to portray Barbara and Jim preparing their nest for the new arrival. Tony, who was preparing his nest for his own new arrival, had recently attempted to install a sink at home, after watching a do-it-yourself programme, and comical pandemonium had ensued – June had laughed like a drain when the waste pipe simply dropped off the first time the taps were turned on. In ‘The New Bathroom’ Jim decides to do without the services of a plumber after watching a do-it-yourself programme on television, although he tries to do not just it but everything himself. Tony was working on the mathematically dubious basis that a sink plus a bath plus a lavatory would produce sufficient comical pandemonium to entertain the entire population of Britain, rather than just a very pregnant and slightly hysterical June. It turned out, though, that the more porcelain a script contained, the less amusing it became, a discovery that might one day be helpful to future generations of comedy writers but was of no use whatsoever to Tony and Bill. It was too late. They had spent the entire tenner, frittered it away, and they had nothing else.

‘You can say it was my idea,’ said Tony before the first rehearsal.

‘I will, because it was your idea,’ said Bill.

‘You know what I mean,’ said Tony.

‘It’s going out with my name on it, so I’ll defend it.’

‘Do you want to take your name off it?’

‘Of course not!’ Bill said quickly. ‘No.’ The ‘no’ was delivered with much less conviction.

‘What does that mean?’

‘What do you think it means?’

‘Tell me.’

‘It means, “We’ve never done that before.” ’

Tony laughed.

‘I knew it meant something. Do you want to see how it goes down with the others?’

‘No.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means no. Definitely. That’s a terrible idea.’

‘Why?’

‘You’re saying that if they all think it’s a load of rubbish I can take my name off? But if they think it’s all right I take half the credit?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘That’s a recipe for disaster. We can’t run a partnership like that. But maybe it’s something to think about in the future.’

‘Why wouldn’t it be a recipe for disaster then?’

‘We just agree in advance. Before a word’s been written. “I just fancy doing this one on my own.” Or, you know, “The baby’s teething, will you take over this week?” Maybe the break would do us good.’

‘I see what you mean.’

It made perfect sense to Tony, and it scared him half to death.

‘It needs a bit of work,’ said Tony after the read-through. ‘And a lot of it will be funnier once the special effects are in.’

The script hadn’t got a single laugh. Even Dennis, who usually tried to help them out with a sticky first draft, seemed nonplussed.