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 something 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?’