Funny Girl(73)

‘Special effects?’ said Clive. ‘It’s a leaky tap, not The Ten Commandments.’

‘Did you even understand what you were reading?’ said Bill. ‘It’s a flood. The bath, the WC, the sink …’

‘Hilarious,’ said Clive. ‘The WC overflows. Do you really want to begin this series with lavatory humour?’

‘It’s not lavatory humour,’ said Tony. ‘It’s humour about a lavatory. And a sink, and a bath. That’s different.’

‘But it’s that physical unfunny stuff.’

‘Like Laurel and Hardy, you mean?’ said Bill. ‘Or Harold Lloyd?’

‘Exactly,’ said Clive, slightly mystified as to why Bill would make his argument for him.

Bill rolled his eyes.

‘You don’t think Laurel and Hardy are funny, Clive?’ said Dennis.

Clive simply laughed.

‘I’ll tell you what it reminds me of,’ said Clive. ‘An old Lucille Ball episode. I mean that in a bad way, Sophie, before you get excited.’

But it was too late.

‘Give me something to do,’ she said to Bill and Tony. ‘I just stand about shrieking.’

‘I don’t know what else you can do when your toilet is flushing straight through the ceiling,’ said Tony.

‘Why can’t Barbara watch the do-it-yourself programme?’

‘Why would Jim think of having a go? If Barbara’s the one who’s watched the programme?’ said Clive.

‘I think what Sophie is suggesting,’ said Dennis, ‘is that she has a go at plumbing the bathroom.’

Clive snorted.

‘What’s so funny?’ said Sophie.

‘Hopefully, the idea of Barbara plumbing a bathroom,’ said Dennis.

‘Yes, the idea of it,’ said Clive. ‘But not the, the reality.’

‘What wouldn’t be funny about the reality?’ said Dennis.

‘And are we talking about me, or Barbara?’ said Sophie.

‘And are you just snorting at the idea of a woman doing the plumbing?’ said Tony.

Clive was looking hounded, but Tony’s question offered him an escape.

‘Well, I presume she’s going to make a right mess of it,’ he said. ‘Otherwise there’s no show.’

‘She will make a mess of it, yes,’ said Tony. ‘But the idea of a woman plumbing a bathroom isn’t funny per se.’

‘I disagree,’ said Clive.

The conversation, Tony thought later, neatly captured all the maddening contradictions of the show. Jim plumbing the bathroom was boring and obvious; Barbara making a mess of it was funny and fresh and then entirely predictable. Maybe that was how television – and, he supposed, life – always worked.

One member of the audience was physically sick during the recording. Laughter took hold of her body and shook it and shook it until she was forced to vomit all over the back of the seat in front of her. The business with the flood – and admittedly Tony and Bill had rebuilt and polished and tinkered until the script was a gleaming, ugly, loud machine, an American motorcycle of an episode – had to be re-recorded because the delight of the audience drowned out the dialogue. Sophie plumbed and flooded with such artful dizziness that finally she earned comparisons with Lucille Ball, in the popular press anyway. The scene in which Jim comes in to find Barbara standing on the toilet cistern, whereupon she pretends that nothing has happened, was shown in the BBC’s Christmas highlights programme four years in a row, and came to define Barbara (and Jim). And Bill, in a spirit of desperation, began to take his novel seriously.





15


Dennis had been invited to more dinner parties since Edith’s departure than he had during his entire marriage, even if he discounted the ones that his mother had been throwing with humiliating regularity. He seemed to have become an official Eligible Bachelor. He had been introduced to single women who were terrifyingly similar to Edith, and single women who were clearly intended to be the opposite. The Ediths were tall and skinny and intellectual; the opposites were short and stout and intellectual. Dennis’s Cambridge degree, which was apparently as cramping and defining as a devout religious belief, meant that the cleverness was an unalterable given, but he found it hard to convince himself that short, stout intellectuals were his type. This was, he was sure, due to his shallowness, but there didn’t seem to be anything he could do about it.