Funny Girl(87)

‘We need more than an agony aunt,’ said Tony. ‘We need the Marriage Guidance Council.’

And Bill’s eyes suddenly brightened, for the first time in weeks.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Dennis when they told him the idea. ‘What’s wrong with them?’

‘What’s wrong with them,’ said Bill, ‘is that they’re the opposite.’

‘But they’ve always been the opposite,’ said Dennis. ‘That’s what the show is about.’

‘Yes, and now it’s coming to its logical conclusion. They’re struggling to make their marriage work, because they’re too different. They need help.’

‘Just checking,’ said Dennis. ‘You’re keeping it as a comedy, are you? Or is it a Wednesday Play? Perhaps he could strangle her at the end.’

‘Why can’t marriage guidance be funny?’ said Bill.

‘How many couples who go to marriage guidance are laughing?’ said Dennis.

‘How many of them want to be?’ said Tony.

‘There’s a divorce epidemic,’ said Bill.

‘You don’t need to tell me that,’ said Dennis.

‘Sorry,’ said Bill. ‘Forgot.’

‘But that’s just it,’ said Dennis. ‘You can’t go round apologizing to everybody.’ He looked at Bill searchingly. ‘Is this all because of bloody Till Death Us Do Part?’

Bill refused to make eye contact.

‘It’s really put your nose out of joint, hasn’t it?’

‘I just want to write something about the real world,’ said Bill. ‘And in the real world, a couple like Barbara and Jim would need help.’

Dennis sighed. He liked working with talented, thoughtful people, but sometimes he wished he could have the same level of success with unimaginative hacks.

‘And are they going to survive it?’ he said eventually. ‘Because I want this marriage to work.’

‘Let’s get them through to the end of the series and worry about the rest later,’ said Bill.

Nancy Lawson, the actress Dennis found to play Marguerite, was the poshest person that any of them had ever met. She was posher than Edith, even, the previous world record holder; Edith’s father was a doctor, but Nancy’s father was some sort of lord. He had a little castle somewhere in Northumberland and Nancy had gone to an expensive boarding school, before being expelled – for smoking during sex, she claimed. It was a line that she’d clearly used before, many times, but it still worked: not only did it get a laugh, but Tony noticed that Clive immediately started to fiddle with his packet of cigarettes. He didn’t offer Nancy one for a couple of minutes, though, in the hope that Sophie wouldn’t make the connection. (She did.)

Sophie was pin-up sexy, all legs and bosoms and blonde hair, but Nancy, who must have been ten years older, seemed to promise something darker and more dangerous. She also had a strange collection of filthy aphorisms, a parody of the kind of thing you might find in etiquette books: ‘A gentleman always lets a lady use the flannel first,’ for example. Or ‘A lady never uses her hands to put on a French letter.’ She wouldn’t have made a very good marriage guidance counsellor in real life, unless you went to her with a very specific set of marital problems. She was an excellent comic actress, though – Dennis had noticed her in a couple of the Brian Rix farces – and once they had made her do up a few buttons and tuck her artfully long, wavy dark hair up into a bun, she managed to convey the necessary gravitas. It was those rounded vowels they were after. Tony and Bill had, unusually for them, done a little research, and as far as they could tell, the ladies who worked for the Marriage Guidance Council were the bored private-school-educated wives of bishops, surgeons and captains of industry, and Marguerite would almost certainly go home every night to a nice house in Hampstead or Primrose Hill. Nancy was cut from a different cloth. Yes, one could imagine that she might have married a captain of industry once upon a time, but she would either have left him or, more likely, killed him within weeks of the wedding.

Tony and Bill rewrote their script when they understood how good Nancy was. In the first draft it took fifteen minutes to get Barbara and Jim into Marguerite’s office. They spent the first half of the script shouting and crying, before coming to the conclusion that they needed help. The misery was cut down to a couple of pages, and the show now started in the middle of a row which, it was suggested, had been going on for months – so that they could get to Nancy sooner.