Funny Girl(79)

‘Nobody else I know is doing this stuff,’ he said to Tony. ‘They’re all trying to upset their parents, not entertain them.’

‘By doing what?’

‘They’re having sex onstage at the Royal Court. Or they’re making underground films about decadent Romantic poets.’

‘Nobody’s stopping you,’ said Tony. ‘You can go off and earn three bob in your spare time whenever you want. And during the day you can write the most popular comedy series in Britain.’

‘It isn’t the most popular comedy series in Britain with everyone.’

‘No. Half the country isn’t watching us. I can live with that.’

‘Except the other half contains all the smart people. They’ve given up on us.’

‘Who are the smart people?’

‘The people having sex onstage at the Royal Court.’

‘They’re out on Thursday nights,’ said Tony. ‘We don’t have to worry about them.’

The only time Bill felt anything like the old spark was when Barbara and Jim argued, which, presumably as a consequence, they seemed to be doing with more frequency. Otherwise, he had to turn to his hobby for absorption, and the feeling that what he wrote was who he was.

He’d started on Soho Boy in the mornings, early, before he met Tony at the office. He’d never written prose before, and at first it didn’t come easily: he began with the belief that if he wanted reviews, then every sentence had to contain a minimum of five subclauses. And he was dishing out the adverbs as if there was no tomorrow, possibly because neither Barbara nor Jim had any use for them. They never said anything witheringly or walked gingerly or smiled icily. They just walked and smiled and said things. But after ‘The New Bathroom’, when he knew that he needed something else to keep him sane, he started thinking about the book more seriously, analysing what it was he didn’t like. And as a result, he started to allow his character – a young homosexual who’d walked out on his life in the West Midlands and come to London – to speak conversationally. Soho Boy became Diary of a Soho Boy, and suddenly he felt like someone who might at least finish a book. He set himself a target of twenty single-spaced pages a week, and some weeks he managed more than that. Before they’d finished writing the third series, he had a sheaf of papers by his typewriter which could, if looked at from the right angle, be described as a manuscript.





16


Sophie met Lucille Ball and Harold Wilson within a ten-day period, and the near-collision, which would have seemed like something from a rather desperate school English essay just a few years before, wasn’t even a wild coincidence. She met famous people almost routinely. She didn’t know them well, but she was frequently in the same room, and she was frequently asked to say hello – to George Best, who was gorgeous and wanted her phone number, to Tommy Cooper, to Marianne Faithfull, even to Reggie Kray. Famous people were two a penny. And in any case Lucy wasn’t as famous as she had been. She no longer meant very much to Sophie’s generation. But when Diane called to say that Lucy was in London making a television special, Sophie knew that she had to at least make an effort to thank her for everything.

‘Will she speak to me, though?’ she said to Diane.

‘She’d be silly not to. You’re Sophie Straw, now. She’s Lucille Ball, then. It will do her more good than it’ll do you.’

‘Don’t say that.’

‘It’s true.’

‘What would I say to her?’

Sophie could already feel the panic in her stomach. She would let herself down, probably in a Lucy-like way – by falling over, or getting her name wrong, or taking Lucy’s handbag by mistake and getting arrested by the police, although she would manage to do it in a way that wasn’t the slightest bit funny.

‘Just say how much you love her show, and how she was an inspiration, and all that.’

‘And then what?’

‘Well, she’ll probably ask you a question, and you’ll be away.’

‘What sort of thing will she ask me?’

‘It won’t be anything you don’t know the answer to. She won’t ask you what the square of the hypotenuse is.’

‘Give me a for instance.’

‘Sophie, how long have you been acting for?’

‘Oh, God. Then I’ll have to tell her this is my first show and she’ll ask me how come I started as the lead in a series and – will you go with me?’