Funny Girl(84)

‘We’ve been recommissioned, though, if that’s any consolation,’ said Dennis.

‘If they won’t put out a show in general election week, you can tell them where to stick their new series,’ said Bill.

‘Oh, tommyrot,’ said Dennis.

‘I’m not having them cancel a show whenever they feel like it,’ said Bill.

‘It’s not whenever they feel like it,’ said Dennis. ‘It’s whenever there’s a general election. They may stop you from banging on about the iniquities of the class system during the next one too. Factor in a week off some time in the spring of 1971.’

‘So what’s the bloody point?’ said Bill. ‘Seriously? If they gag you the moment it counts?’

‘Just a gentle reminder that you’re supposed to be writing a situation comedy about a married couple,’ said Dennis. ‘Not the Labour Party Manifesto.’

‘Of course, it would be a gentle reminder,’ said Bill. ‘A gentle reminder about a gentle comedy. Everything’s so bloody gentle and polite. Especially you.’

‘Steady on, Bill,’ said Tony.

‘I’ve been called worse,’ said Dennis.

‘Why aren’t you more worked up about it anyway?’ Bill said to Tony. ‘Trust you to lie on the ground with your belly up and your paws in the air.’

Every story contains a moment you can point at and say, ‘Look, there, that’s where it all unravelled,’ and maybe this was such a moment. That was what Dennis would say, in years to come: ‘It was never the same after that election-week row.’ But Tony was a storyteller, and he knew that if you looked at any narrative closely enough you could trace the unravelling back and back and back – right to the very beginning, if the story was good enough.

The strange thing was that the argument seemed synthetic to Tony. Could anyone really care that much about being paid not to work? The anger was clearly real, though. It was in there, sloshing around, looking for the nearest hole to escape through.

‘Are you really going to tell them where to stick their new series?’ said Tony later. ‘Because I’m not.’

‘You’d do it without me?’

‘No,’ said Tony. ‘Of course not. But I’ve got to do something. I’ve got a wife and a kid on the way.’

‘Oh, have you, Tony? I didn’t know. You should have mentioned that before.’

‘That’s a bit unfair.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Bill, without meaning it.

Tony caught a glimpse of something. Was that what it was all about? Perhaps it was. The nuclear family always represented something to a man, especially a single man, especially a single man with an anarchic streak, especially a single man with an anarchic streak who found himself having to write about a nuclear family to earn his living. And Tony’s nuclear family meant a lot more to Bill than most nuclear families, for obvious reasons. Tony didn’t want June and his unborn child to be a sort of Vietnam, and he didn’t want to be on the wrong side. But he was starting to fear that it was too late and that the battle lines had been drawn up a long time ago.





THE FOURTH SERIES





17


Roger Nicholas Holmes was born in the Bushey Maternity Hospital, three weeks after the last episode of the third series had been broadcast. It was a relatively short labour, five hours, but it seemed like an eternity to Tony. He had started off in the corridor outside the maternity ward, smoking and attempting to do the Times crossword, but the terrible noises and the occasionally urgent dashes of the midwives and nurses upset him too much, so in the end he went to the pub, and came back on the hour every hour until eventually he was presented with a thirty-five-minute-old son.

He’d been worried that he wouldn’t feel enough. He’d wept when Barbara had had her baby in the series, which he’d hoped at the time was an indication of normal human emotions, but afterwards he wondered whether the tears had come because of his investment in the programme, or because he always found it easy to cry at things that weren’t real. He’d been in a right mess at the end of The Sound of Music, for example. But when he held his son for the first time, he was beset immediately by spasmodic and uncontrollable sobs that seemed to start right deep in his stomach. He needn’t have worried. Everyone loved their own children, it turned out. Tony wished there was a way that homosexual men could be given this moment. He’d like Bill to feel what he was feeling.