Funny Girl

by Nick Hornby

  ‘What about the series?’

  He wasn’t interested in the father or her marital state, she noted. Together, Brian and her mother would form a whole, rounded person.

  ‘They’ll wait,’ she said.

  ‘Do you think?’ said Brian, apparently amused.

  ‘It’s called Everyone Loves Sophie. I’m Sophie.’

  He picked a photograph out of the middle of the pile.

  ‘What about if they called it Everyone Loves Freda? She’s Freda.’

  ‘Freda’s a terrible name.’

  ‘We’ll change it. Everyone Loves Suzy. How does that sound?’

  It sounded both frightening and plausible, and for a moment she found herself thinking, Well, he’s won the argument. But then she realized the argument wasn’t real. She wasn’t going to go and see a discreet doctor in Harley Street. She understood that she could: the option was real, even if the argument wasn’t. The doctor could take the baby away, make it vanish, just as Barbara’s baby had vanished. And Tony and Diane need know nothing about it, and she could appear as childless, carefree, girl-about-town Sophie in a series called Everyone Loves Sophie. But how much fun would it be to play the part of a childless, carefree girl-about-town immediately after an abortion? How would she feel, having an abortion so that she could become a carefree, childless fictional character? How much delight would Dennis, the father of the aborted child, take in producing the show? How funny would he find carefree Sophie’s predicaments and pickles?

  To her mother, it must have looked as though she could do anything she wanted to do. She could move from one end of the country to another, change her name, live on her own, sleep with whoever she wanted to without marrying them, drink tea at the Ritz, make babies disappear overnight, probably bringing them back again, if she felt like it. And it was true, she could. But it seemed to her that to take advantage of all of these opportunities, she had to turn something off inside her. She had to pretend that nothing mattered, as long as she got the life she thought she wanted. For some reason, she started thinking about how Everyone Loves Sophie or Everyone Loves Suzy would end, six months or five years into the future: Sophie or Suzy would meet someone, and want to have a baby with him, and Tony and Diane would run out of things to say. That was how half the stories in the world ended. She wasn’t sure it was the best ending, but it was the only one people seemed to be able to think of for girls like her. And Sophie had met someone, in real life, and she was pregnant by him, and he made her happy. You couldn’t keep asking to have the pages crumpled up and thrown in the bin, especially if they made sense.

  ‘Well,’ said Brian, after he’d finally understood. ‘I’ll still be here when you’re ready to come back.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Sophie.

  Brian couldn’t interest Dennis in Freda, or Suzy, or any of the girls who had sent him photographs, but one evening he saw Caviar and Chips, an ITV show about a working-class family that wins the football pools, and he had a bright idea: he approached the girl who played the family’s teenage daughter, a pretty young actress called Jackie Chamberlain, and told her that he had a series for her. Then he talked to ITV, and then he talked to Tony and Diane, and a few months later Everyone Loves Jackie, a series about a young, carefree, single girl with a cat and boyfriend troubles, was given a Thursday night slot. It didn’t last long, but then, that was the trouble with young people, Brian found: they would insist on getting older.

  FROM THIS DAY FORWARD

  Biographies

  Bill Gardiner, who co-wrote Barbara (and Jim) with Tony Holmes, is the author of the novels Diary of a Soho Boy, The Gospel According to Nigel and The Closet. He is working on a film adaptation of Diary of a Soho Boy. His stage adaptation was put on at the Royal Court in 1969.

  Tony Holmes has written more than twenty series for radio and television. After Barbara (and Jim) he wrote (with Diane Stafford) Everyone Loves Jackie, before going on to create Salt and Vinegar, The Green, Green Grass of Home and Would Like to Have Met for ITV. He is a frequent contributor to the radio series I’m Sorry, I Haven’t a Clue and Just a Minute.

  Clive Richardson has had a long career in television in both the UK and the US. He was Dr Nigel Fisher in ER, and for many years played Chief Inspector Richard Jury in the successful and popular Jury, adapted from the books of Martha Grimes. He lives with his third wife, the American actress Carrie Courtenay, in Hollywood.

  Sophie Straw has been a much-loved star of British stage and screen ever since she introduced herself to the British viewing public in Barbara (and Jim). Her TV series include His and Hearse, Salt and Vinegar, The Green, Green Grass of Home, Would Like to Have Met and Minnie Cab. She is now probably best remembered for her work in the long-running soap opera Chatterton Avenue, where she played Liz Smallwood from 1982 to 1996. Her stage work includes touring productions of The Importance of Being Earnest, A Taste of Honey and several of the plays of Alan Ayckbourn, including A Chorus of Disapproval and The Norman Conquests. She was married to the producer and director of Barbara (and Jim), Dennis Maxwell-Bishop, until his death in 2011. She has two children. Her daughter, Georgia Maxwell-Bishop, received a BAFTA nomination for her performance as Adela Quested in the BBC’s adaptation of A Passage to India.

  From the programme notes to the BAFTA tribute Barbara (and Jim): The Golden Wedding Anniversary, October 2014

  24

  Sophie tried to remember whether she had ever seen herself projected on to a big screen, and decided that she hadn’t. Except she’d had a small part in that peculiar thing with Ewan McGregor four or five years ago, playing the mother of his deranged ex-wife, and she was almost certain that she’d been to the premiere, and been coaxed on to the stage with everyone else, Ewan and Ros and Jim Broadbent. Had she not even stayed to watch the film? She thought she had. She could remember huge chunks of Barbara (and Jim), could have chanted along with the lines as she watched, yet half the time she couldn’t remember what she’d eaten for supper the previous evening. She didn’t care very often, because not many of the suppers were worth remembering, but her memory was annoying at times like this, when she wanted to remember.

  And then she realized what it was: she’d never seen this version of herself cinema-sized, the twenty-one-year-old version. She’d only ever seen her ancient self up there, and shuddered, and looked away, and actively tried to forget the lines on her face and the lumpy shapelessness afterwards. She hadn’t bothered with the premiere of Chemin de Fer, the awful film she’d made with the French pop singer in Wales. (She had caught as much as she could bear to watch on TV one night, a few years ago, on one of the hundreds of obscure channels to which Dennis had insisted on subscribing. Without him, she would never be able to find any of them again.) And this was the first time that Barbara (and Jim) had been shown in a cinema, as far as she knew.

  It wasn’t something she would do again in a hurry, that was for sure. She had hoped that the tribute evening would be a happy experience, that it would be nice to see everyone and talk about the past and bask in all the praise and love. She had thought that she was even getting to a stage where she could listen to people talking about Dennis without feeling as though her guts were being pulled out through her throat. She hadn’t, however, prepared herself for a different, less admirable grief. Maybe it was better to have been beautiful once than never to have been beautiful at all, but the advantages of beauty were now long gone. And she couldn’t help but feel that she was depressing everybody else too – everybody up on the stage with her, everybody in the audience, even the young people who believed that there would be a cure for old age any day now. Look, everybody! Age has withered me. And also custom has staled my infinite variety!

  After they’d shown the episodes and the house lights were turned on, the questions from the audience came in an apparently unstoppable torrent. ‘Just how wet did you get in “The New Bathroom”?’ ‘If you had your time all over again, Jim, would you have stayed with Barbara?’ ‘Can you tell us somethi
ng about your writing process, Tony?’ ‘I’d like to ask all of you to name your favourite episode.’ ‘Which modern comediennes do you admire?’ ‘Why isn’t there anything as funny as Barbara (and Jim) on TV any more?’ (Applause.) ‘When did you know you were appearing in a classic sitcom?’ Did people really want to know the answers to these things, or did they just want someone from the team to look at them?

  The people who’d been laughing uproariously – ostentatiously, if you wanted to be unkind – weren’t all as old as her. There were some who must have watched the show as kids, and there were some who were young – women, mostly. Young women often seemed to want to tell her that she had been an inspiration to them, that their careers in comedy would not have been possible without her. But when she tried to watch them, or listen to their recordings, or read their stories and scripts, Sophie couldn’t understand what she’d had to do with any of it. If she was somehow responsible for all these jokes about anal sex and vaginal hygiene, she felt she owed the people of Britain an apology.

  The audience had seen the pilot and ‘The New Bathroom’, because they were two of the only surviving shows: the BBC had recorded over the tapes. And of course Sophie regretted that so much of her best work was gone, but she understood the impulse. They were only comedy programmes, made fifty years ago to entertain people who were now all old or dead. And anyway, hadn’t those tapes been recycled, at a time when nobody used the word, and nobody worried about the planet drowning in a sea of plastic rubbish? But a dozen episodes out of the original sixty or so had survived, or in some cases been found: every now and again, an engineer or an editor came across something in an attic or a shed. It wasn’t much, but it was probably enough.

  ‘One more question,’ said the compère, an earnest young man from the British Film Institute who looked as though he’d never laughed in his life, and certainly not at an English situation comedy.

  Another young man who needed a shave thrust his hand up in the air, and the compère pointed at him, and everyone had to wait while the microphone was passed along the row.

  ‘Would you consider reviving the characters?’ he said. ‘If someone came along with the right script and the right idea?’

  Sophie laughed. She always knew the kind of noise she wanted to make, but it always came out wrong, croaky, phlegmy, cracked. The terrible thing was that one always thought everything was temporary – the croak, the creaks, the pains, the insomnia. All those things used to be temporary. They cleared up. Not any more.

  ‘What do you think, Clive?’ she said.

  That was another thing she was suddenly self-conscious of this evening: her accent. There was no trace of Barbara from Blackpool. She sounded like a theatrical grande dame, she thought. Fifty years of Barbara (and Jim) meant fifty years of London. She had only lived in the North for a third of her life, after all that.

  Clive was not awake, so she turned back to the audience.

  ‘Do people really want to watch old people moaning on?’

  There was laughter, and some shouts of ‘Yes!’ and ‘We do!’, and applause.

  ‘You don’t have to moan on,’ said the young man with the stubble.

  ‘You’re quite right,’ said Sophie. ‘I should remember that. In life, I mean.’

  ‘There’s quite a market for things starring old people,’ said the young man. ‘There was that film about the old folks’ home for opera singers, and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel … The grey pound is really worth something.’

  ‘Well,’ said Sophie, ‘nobody’s asked us, as far as I know.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Clive. ‘Did you ask me something?’

  Sophie raised her eyebrows despairingly, and got a laugh.

  ‘I’m asking you now,’ said the young man with the stubble. ‘I’m a producer, and I have investors who …’

  ‘Ah,’ said the BFI compère, ‘I now see that this is more of a sales pitch than a question. Perhaps you could have a word with Sophie privately afterwards?’

  He thanked everyone for coming, and they got a standing ovation, and afterwards there was a long queue of people who wanted autographs on their DVD collections, and old eight by tens, and the first-day-cover series of Great British Sitcoms that the Post Office had issued at what young people called the turn of the century. (When Sophie had first heard that, she wanted to weep at her own confusion. That’s when you know you’re old, when you start to get your turns of the century muddled up.) She thought she’d be exhausted, but the more she signed, the younger she felt.

  The young man with the stubble waited at the back of the line. Sophie – he’d focused on her – hadn’t been able to get rid of him, so in the end they’d asked him into the green room for a drink. Sophie wasn’t even sure that she’d wanted to get rid of him. Sometimes people asked her to do something, appear on a documentary about the 1960s or read a short story on Radio 4 about a grandmother forcing herself not to interfere in her daughter’s parenting mistakes. (She had read three of those.) But Max, the young man with the stubble, was talking about a starring role in a play.

  ‘I’m not going to tell you it’ll take the West End by storm,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t work like that.’

  ‘It works like that for some people,’ said Tony.

  ‘Young people,’ said Bill.

  ‘What can I tell you?’ said Max, his arms spread in defeat. ‘You ain’t young people. But you never know. If we got the story right, and it made people laugh, I can see you doing well in the regional theatres. Places like Bexhill and Eastbourne, anywhere, you know …’

  ‘Anywhere people go to die,’ said Clive.

  He was awake now. He’d flown from California for the tribute, so he could be forgiven his erratic participation in the evening. It did mean, however, that his long journey had been a complete waste of time. He’d slept through the episodes, woken briefly when the lights came up and nodded off again during the Q&A.

  ‘That’s exactly not what I’m thinking of,’ said Max passionately. ‘I’ve got a title. From This Day Forward. From the marriage vows. Old people want to be offered hope. Don’t you think? It’s not all doom and gloom.’

  ‘It really is,’ said Bill.

  ‘Well, your job is to find something that isn’t,’ said Max.

  ‘You’d love that,’ said June, who had been in the audience with Roger and his wife.

  ‘It’s not really a job, though, is it?’ said Tony. ‘A job is when someone pays you to do something.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll get the money to pay you for a script,’ said Max. ‘I wouldn’t ask you to write for free.’

  ‘I’m in,’ said Bill.

  Tony looked at him.

  ‘What?’ Bill said. ‘I’m fucking skint.’

  The last time they had all been in the same room was after Dennis’s funeral, but it had hardly been a reunion, not with everyone else there. Sophie and Dennis had been together for a long time after Barbara (and Jim), and the wake had been full of children, and grandchildren, and friends, and godchildren, and colleagues from all the shows that had come after. The programme she always thought of as their show took up only a tiny little corner of their sitting room. There had been a moment when she’d looked over and seen Clive, Tony and Bill talking and laughing, and she had longed for everyone else, even her children, to leave, just for thirty minutes, so that she could talk about Dennis to the people who’d watched her fall in love with him. But she knew that nobody else would have understood, and she wasn’t sure she could explain the impulse even to herself, so the night had ended, as it should have, with Georgia and Christian and a Balthazar of champagne that Dennis had been saving for a special occasion. Either he had left it too long or he knew what he was doing, depending on how you looked at it.

  If she were to bet on whose funeral they’d be attending next, then her money would have to go on Bill, but the odds wouldn’t be very good: he looked awful. The long, yellowy-white beard was regrettable, and the walking stick that only just enabled mobility put y
ears on him, but beards and sticks weren’t going to kill him; the drinking and the smoking would do that. Except, of course, that they hadn’t, and he was older than Sophie, and if he dropped dead tomorrow, nobody would talk about a life cut tragically short by his addictions. He’d lived his life. They all had. Any years remaining to them were a gift, if that was the right word. Oh, of course it was the right word. She wished she and her friends could stop speaking like that. She was almost certain that they made those bitter jokes just to disguise their pathetic, doomed hunger to live longer.

  ‘How much are you going to pay us?’ Bill said.

  ‘You really want to talk about that now?’ said Max. ‘In front of everyone?’

  ‘He’s going to pay you a tenner, Bill,’ said Clive. ‘Now what?’

  ‘Oh, it’ll be more than a tenner,’ said Max, at a volume and with a conviction that suggested fifteen would be closer to the mark.

  ‘I think Clive’s point was that it’s a buyer’s market,’ said Tony. ‘It doesn’t matter what you pay us. We haven’t got any other work.’

  ‘Tony, you don’t want to think about shutting up, do you?’ said Bill. ‘You’re costing us money.’

  ‘I’ll just have a chat to your agent about all that, shall I?’ said Max.

  ‘You do that,’ said Bill. ‘We’ll lend you a Ouija board.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Max.

  ‘I’ve still got an agent,’ said Tony. ‘You can speak to her.’

  ‘Do you just do this sort of thing at random?’ said Clive. ‘Are you a regular ambusher of old duffers?’

  ‘No,’ said Max. ‘It was you I wanted.’

  ‘I’ll bet you say that to all the girls,’ said Sophie.

  ‘I’m actually a bit obsessive about Barbara (and Jim).’

  ‘I’ll bet you say that to all the sitcom couples,’ said Clive.

  ‘It’s true,’ said Max. ‘I can prove it.’