Therapy

by David Lodge

  Hi. How did we exist before Call Waiting? That was Gloria Fawn’s agent. She passed on Switchback. So what’s new, I don’t suppose he even showed her the script. Well, fuck ’em … Oh yeah, so like I was saying, it really freaked me out to think that this guy had flown six thousand miles to change his mind about a proposition that was four years old. It was like you said to someone, pass the salt, and four years later he shows up with a salt cellar. Well, I figured I’d better set him straight as soon as possible, so when he tried to top up my wine glass I put my hand over it and said I was cutting down because I was trying to conceive and if I succeeded I’d have to give up completely … Yeah. I thought I’d better go for it. The old biological clock is ticking away. Nick is keen … Well, thanks, Stella. I’m relying on you for some chic maternity wear … Anyway, this announcement stopped Tubby Passmore in his tracks, but he still didn’t get it. I think for a moment he thought I wanted to have a child by him … Well, you can laugh, but this guy is unreal, I’m telling you. So then I explained I was with Nick and he like crumpled in front of my eyes. I thought he was going to start crying into his shrimp and lemon-grass soup. I said to him, “What’s the matter?” though I knew very well what was the matter, and he quoted Kierkegaard at me … Yeah, Kierkegaard the philosopher. Not Kierkegaard the smorgasbord. Heh heh. He said, “The most dreadful thing that can happen to a man is to become ridiculous in his own eyes in a matter of essential importance.” Yeah. That was it. I wrote it down afterwards.

  Well, as you can imagine, the evening never recovered. I ate all the food and he drank all the wine, and I did all the talking. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the guy, so I told him about Prozac. Believe it or not, he’d never heard of it. He shook his head and said he never took tranquillizers. “I had a bad experience with Valium, once,” he said. Valium! I mean this guy is pharmaceutically in the Stone Age. I explained to him that Prozac wasn’t a tranquillizer, or an ordinary anti-depressant, but an entirely new wonder-drug. I gave him a real sales pitch … Sure, honey, don’t you? Doesn’t everybody in Hollywood? … Well, Nick and I swear by it. Sure. We have a chart thumbtacked to the kitchen wall telling us when to take our little green and white capsules … Well, it changed my life … No, I wasn’t depressed, you don’t have to be depressed to take it. It does wonders for your self-confidence. Like I’d never have had the courage to resign from Mediamax without Prozac … Oh, yeah, I read that story in Time magazine but I never experienced anything like that … You should try it, really, Stella … Well, there is one side effect, I have to admit: it makes it harder to have an orgasm. But as you haven’t got a lover at the moment, honey, what have you got to lose? No, of course not, Stella, but Prozac could tide you over … Well, fine, honey, we all have our own ways of coping with adversity … Oh, I drove him back to the Beverly Wilshire and he fell asleep in the car, either from booze or jet-lag or disappointment or a combination of all of them. The bell captain opened the door of the car, and I gave Tubby a kiss on the cheek, and pushed him out and watched him stumble into the lobby. I felt kinda sorry for him, but what could I do? … I don’t know, I suppose he’ll go back to London … Would you really? … Well, I don’t know. I could ask him, if you like … Are you sure this is a good idea, Stella? … Well, if you say so. You realize he’s not exactly England’s answer to Warren Beatty, don’t you? … Oh he’s clean all right, you don’t have to worry about that. I’ll call him right now and tell him I’ve got this gorgeous unattached girlfriend who’s dying to meet him … Speak to you soon.

  OH, HALLO GEORGE, how goes it in Current Affairs? Good good. Oh, surviving, just about. Thanks, I need one. Draught Bass, please. Oh, make it a pint. Ta. Yeah, one of those mornings. My secretary is off sick, our fax machine is on the blink, the BBC have snapped up a Canadian soap I had my eye on, and some cunt of a solicitor is suing us because he has the same name as the bent lawyer in that episode of Motorway Patrol – did you see it? No, the week before last. Ah, thank you, Gracie. And a packet of crisps, smoky bacon flavour. No, no, George, let me pay for the crisps. Well, if you insist. Thanks, Gracie. Cheers, George. Ah. I needed that. What? Oh, I suppose we’ll buy him off with a few grand, it’s cheaper in the long run. Shall we sit down? Over there, in the corner. I like to have my back to the wall in this place, less chance of being overheard. Yeah, but it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. Ha ha. Here we are. Have a crisp. If I could open the bloody packet. They should make something to open these plastic packets with, something like a cigar-cutter you could carry in your pocket, I’ve a good mind to patent it, you could make a fortune. Oops! See what I mean? Either it won’t open at all or it splits down the middle and spills the whole shoot in your lap. Have one, anyway. I saw a bloke in a pub the other day, I swear to God he went ten rounds with a packet of Walton’s Crisps. Broke a fingernail trying to tear the packet open, damn near broke a tooth trying to bite through it, finished up in desperation setting fire to it with his cigarette-lighter. I kid you not. I think he was trying to melt the corner of the packet but it went up in flames, whoosh, singed the bloke’s eyebrows and stank the place out with the smell of burning chip fat. Honest. Now if we put that on television we wouldn’t dare say Walton’s Crisps, they’d be down on us like a ton of bricks, well fair enough I suppose, but it’s coming to something if you have to check the name of every bloody solicitor in the country before a script can be cleared. Nice drop of beer, this.

  Yeah, it’s been one of those mornings all right. To top it all, I had a meeting with Tubby Passmore. A basket case if ever there was one. Well, he’s giving me a lot of grief at the moment. I suppose you know about Debbie Radcliffe? Oh, I thought Dave Treece would’ve put you in the picture. Well, keep it under your hat, but she wants to leave The People Next Door. Yeah. You bet it’s serious. Her contract runs out at the end of the current series, and she won’t renew at any price, the stupid cow. I dunno, she says she wants to go back on the stage. Is she? Well, I wouldn’t know, I never go to the theatre if I can help it. Can’t stand it. It’s like being strapped to your seat in front of a telly with only one channel. And you can’t talk, you can’t eat, you can’t drink, you can’t go out for a piss, you can’t even cross your legs because there’s no room. And they charge you twenty quid for the privilege. Anyway, she’s adamant, so we’ve got to write her part out of the show. It’s still getting great ratings, as you know. Absolutely. At least one more series, probably two or three. So we asked Tubby to rewrite the last episode or two of the present series so as to get rid of Priscilla, you know, Debbie’s part, to make way for a new woman in Edward’s life in the next series, see? We gave Tubby some ideas, but he wouldn’t buy any of ’em. He said the only way was to literally kill her off. In a car accident or on the operating table or something. Yeah, unbelievable, isn’t it? We’d have the whole fucking country crying its eyes out. Debbie’s got to go in a way that leaves the viewers feeling good, stands to reason. I mean, nobody’s pretending it’s easy. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from twenty-seven years in television, it’s that there’s always a solution. I don’t care what the problem is, whether it’s scripts or casting or locations or budget, there’s always a solution – if you think hard enough. The trouble is most people are too fucking idle to make the effort. Only they call it integrity. Tubby said he’d rather see the show come to an end than compromise the integrity of his characters. Did you ever hear such bullshit? This is sitcom we’re talking about, not fucking Ibsen. I’m afraid he’s getting delusions of grandeur, the latest is he wants to write a – Oh, well, fortunately we discovered that under our contract we can hire another writer to take over if Tubby declines to write another series. Yeah. Of course, we don’t want to. We’d prefer Tubby to do the job himself. Oh, fuck his moral rights, George! The point is that he could do the job better than anybody else, if he would only make the effort. Well, it’s a standoff at the moment. He has five weeks to come up with an acceptable idea to ease Debbie out of the show, or else we get anoth
er writer. I dunno, I’m not very hopeful. He doesn’t seem to be living in the real world these days. His private life is in deep shit. You know his wife’s left him? Yeah. First I knew about it was when he called me up one night, at home, very late. He sounded a bit pissed – you know, breathing heavily and long pauses between words. He said he had an idea for writing Debbie out of the show. “Suppose,” he said, “suppose Priscilla just walks out on Edward without warning? Suppose she just tells him in the last episode that she doesn’t want to stay married to him? There isn’t any other man. She just doesn’t love him any more. She doesn’t even like him any more. She says living with him is like living with a zombie. So she’s decided to leave him.” I said to him, “Don’t be ridiculous, Tubby. There has to be more motivation than that. Nobody will believe it.” He said, “Won’t they?” and put the phone down. Next thing I hear is that his wife has walked out on him. You saw that piece in Public Interest? Well, that was the point, wasn’t it? There was no other man. The bloke was gay. Looks as if Tubby’s wife walked out because, like he said, she just didn’t want to be married to him any more. He’s taken it very hard. Of course, anybody would. Will you have another? Same again? What was it, the Club red? Oh, the Saint Emilion, right. You think it’s worth the extra, do you? No, no, you shall have the Saint Emilion, George. I don’t know anything about wine, never pretended to. Small or large? I think I’ll just have a half myself, work to do this afternoon. Oh, right. I’m going to get myself a pie, what about you? Chicken and mushroom, right.

  There we are. One large glass of Saint Emilion. They’ll call out when the pies are ready. We’re nineteen. I was in a pub the other day where they give you playing-cards instead of these cloakroom tickets. The girl at the bar calls out “Queen of Hearts” or “Ten of Spades” or whatever. Clever idea, I thought. I’m always losing these fiddly little things and forgetting my number. Your pie was one twenty-five by the way. Oh, ta. That’s all the change I’ve got, I’ll have to owe you the ten pee, alright? Cheers. Yes, well, he made an appointment to see me this morning. I thought perhaps he’d had a brilliant new idea about how to get rid of Debbie’s part, but no such luck. Instead it turns out that he wants to try his hand at straight drama. Yeah. You won’t believe this, George. He wants to do a series about a geezer called Kikkiguard. Oh, is that how you pronounce it? You’ve heard of him, then? Yeah, that’s right, a Danish philosopher. What else do you know about him? Well, I didn’t even know that much, till Tubby told me. I was gobsmacked, (a), that he was interested in the subject, and (b), that he thought we would be. I said to him, very slowly, “You want to write a drama series for Heartland Television about a Danish philosopher?” I mean, if he’d said it was about a Danish pastry it wouldn’t have sounded any dafter. He just nodded his head. I managed not to laugh in his face. I’ve been through this before with comedy writers. They all get ideas above their station eventually. They want to do without a studio audience, or write about social problems. The other week Tubby had a reference to abortion in his script. I ask you – abortion in a sitcom! You have to either humour them or tell ’em to get stuffed. I still have hopes Tubby may see sense about The People Next Door, so I humoured him. I said, “OK, Tubby, pitch it to me. What’s the story?”

  Well, there was no story, to speak of. This, whatsisname, Kierkegaard bloke, was the son of a wealthy merchant in Copenhagen, we’re in what, the Victorian period, early Victorian. The old man was a gloomy, guilt-ridden old bugger, who brought his children up accordingly. They were very strict Protestants. When he was a young man Kierkegaard kicked against the traces a bit. “They think he may have gone to a brothel once,” Tubby said. “Just once?” I said. “He felt very guilty about it,” Tubby said. “It was probably his only sexual experience. He got engaged to a girl called Regine later, but he broke it off.” “Why?” I said. “He didn’t think they’d be happy,” he said. “He suffered a lot from depression, like his father.” “I can see this isn’t going to be a comedy series, Tubby,” I said. “No,” he said, without cracking a smile. “It’s a very sad story. After he broke off the engagement, nobody could understand why, he went off to Berlin for a while and wrote a book called Either/Or. He came back to Copenhagen, secretly hoping for a reconciliation with Regine, but found she’d got engaged to another man.” He stopped and looked at me soulfully, as if this was the biggest tragedy in the history of the world. “I see,” I said, after a while. “And what did he do then?” “He wrote a lot of books,” Tubby said. “He was qualified to be a minister, but he didn’t agree with making religion a kind of career. Luckily he’d inherited a substantial fortune from his father.” “It sounds like the only bit of luck he did have,” I said. Oh, did she say nineteen, George? Over here, my love, we’re nineteen. One steak and kidney and one chicken and mushroom, that’s it. Lovely. Thanks. That was quick. Microwaved of course. You want to be careful with your first bite, they can burn your bloody tongue these pies. They’re hotter inside than they look. Mm, not bad. What’s yours like? Good. So. Tubby Passmore, yes. I asked him if Kierkegaard was famous in his lifetime. “No,” said Tubby. “His books were considered peculiar and obscure. He was ahead of his time. He was the founder of existentialism. He reacted against the all-encompassing idealism of Hegel.” “This doesn’t sound like the stuff of prime-time commercial television, Tubby,” I said. “I would only glance at the books,” he said. “The main emphasis would be on Kierkegaard’s love for Regine. He was never able to forget her, even after she got married.” “What happened?” I said. “Did they have an affair?” He looked quite shocked at the suggestion. “No, no,” he said. “He saw her around Copenhagen – it was a small place in those days – but they never spoke. Once they came face to face in church and he thought she was going to say something, but she didn’t, and neither did he. It would make a great scene,” he said. “Tremendous emotion, without a word spoken. Just close-ups. And music, of course.” Apparently that was the nearest they ever came to getting together again. When Kierkegaard asked the husband’s permission to write to her, he refused. “But he always loved her,” Tubby said. “He left her everything in his will, though there wasn’t much left when he died.” I asked him what he died of. “An infection of the lungs,” he said. “But in my opinion it was really a broken heart. He had lost the will to live. Nobody really understood his suffering. When he was on his deathbed, his uncle said that there was nothing wrong with him that couldn’t be cured by straightening his shoulders. He was only forty-eight when he died.” I asked what else this geezer did apart from writing books. The answer was, nothing very much, except take carriage drives in the country. I said, “Where’s your jeopardy, Tubby? Where’s your suspense?” He looked rather taken aback. “This isn’t a thriller,” he said. “But you’ve got to have some kind of threat to your hero,” I said. “Well,” he said, “there was a time when a satirical magazine started to attack him. That caused him a lot of pain. They made fun of his trousers.” “His trousers?” I said. I tell you George, I had a struggle to keep a straight face through all this. “Yes, they printed caricatures of him with one leg of his trousers shorter than the other.” Well, as soon as he said “caricature” I remembered that cartoon in Public Interest, and it all clicked into place. Yeah, you got it in one. The guy’s developed some sort of strange identification with this Kierkegaard bloke. It’s all connected with his marital problems. But I didn’t let on. I just recapped the story as he’d pitched it to me. “OK, Tubby, let me see if I’ve got this right,” I said. “There’s this Danish philosopher, nineteenth century, who gets engaged to a bird called Regine, breaks off the engagement for reasons nobody understands, she marries another guy, they never speak to each other again, he lives for another twenty-odd years writing books nobody understands, then he dies, and a hundred years later he’s hailed as the father of existentialism. Do you really think there’s a TV drama series there?” He thought for a moment, and then he said, “Perhaps it would be better as a one-off.” “Much better,” I
said. “But of course, that’s not my territory. You’d have to talk to Alec Woosnam about it.” I thought that was a rather clever move, sending him off to bend Alec’s ear about Kierkegaard. No, of course Alec won’t buy it, do me a favour! But he’ll string Tubby along if I ask him to. Get him to write a treatment, talk to people at Channel Four, go through the motions. If we indulge him on Kierkegaard, he just might play ball over Debbie’s part in The People Next Door. No, he doesn’t have a script editor. We had one on the first series, but we never felt the need after that. Tubby turns in his scripts direct to me and Hal, and we work on them together. I don’t think he’d take kindly to having a script editor again. But it’s a thought, George, definitely a thought. Another one? Well I shouldn’t really, but this pie’s given me a terrible thirst, must be oversalted. Oh, you might as well make it a pint. Ta.