‘He knocked her up,’ said Clive.
‘I think you’ll find he didn’t,’ said Sophie firmly.
‘I don’t think it would go down so well upstairs either,’ said Dennis.
‘Oh, here we go,’ said Bill.
Bill and Tony loved Dennis, and not just because he loved them. He was clever, and he was enthusiastic, and he was endlessly encouraging. But he was a Corporation man to the tips of his brown suede boots, and his playfulness tended to disappear if he thought that the future of the BBC, or his own future within it, was under any threat, real or imagined.
‘O.D. would go for it.’
O.D., or Other Dennis as he was known only in their very small circle, was Dennis Main Wilson, another BBC comedy producer, much more experienced and successful than T.D. – This Dennis. When Tony and Bill were bored, or felt that they weren’t getting anywhere with an idea, they would drop the possibility of Other Dennis into the conversation, and spend a few minutes painting an idyllic word-picture of what their working life would be like with him.
‘Say what you like about O.D., but he’ll always go in to bat for his writers,’ said Bill, mock-wistfully.
‘Oh, this really is too much,’ said Dennis. ‘I have always gone in to bat for you. Always. Even when the match is lost, and the bowling is fast and hostile. Even when … Even when the bat’s got ruddy great holes in it. Like this one did.’
Tony and Bill hooted joyfully.
‘Remember I’m a real person,’ said Sophie.
They all stared at her.
‘I mean, I have come down to London from the North. And I have met a stuck-up snob. And I could have met him somewhere else.’
‘Oh, really?’ said Clive. ‘Such as?’
‘I used to work in Derry and Toms,’ said Sophie. ‘Have you ever been anywhere like that?’
‘Many times,’ said Clive. ‘And I have managed not to marry anyone who served me.’
‘Or a nightclub? I could have been a Pussy at the Whisky A Go Go. I thought of it.’
‘Oh, yes. That’s what those girls are for, taking home to mother.’
‘Your character doesn’t have to be exactly like you, though,’ said Sophie. ‘You could have human blood in your veins. You could be an intellectual who doesn’t meet pretty girls very often.’
‘Yes,’ said Bill. ‘She’s right. You could try acting.’
‘I meet pretty girls all the time,’ said Clive. ‘And they meet me back.’
‘I think he was talking about the intellectual bit,’ said Tony.
‘Could you ever fall in love with someone who poured you a beer in a pub?’ said Dennis.
‘It’s funny you should say that,’ said Clive. ‘There’s a girl who works behind the bar in the Argyll Arms to whom I have in fact proposed. I was drunk at the time. But I was deadly serious.’
‘So there we are,’ said Dennis. ‘Barbara works in a pub and Jim comes in to meet a friend …’
‘I refuse to be a bloody Tory, though,’ said Clive. ‘Nobody in London with half a brain is going to vote for that lot next week. Anyway, what happened to him working at Number Ten?’
Tony and Bill had forgotten that the hapless husband in Wedded Bliss? was originally going to be some kind of thrusting young politico, a press secretary or a speechwriter. That had been dropped when they had turned to the Gambols for inspiration, and the scripts had become so generic that he could only be employed in some unspecified, I’m-off-to-the-office-now-darling white-collar capacity.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Tony. ‘I’d forgotten all about that. It was just about the only decent idea we had when we started.’
‘And by the time it reaches the screen, Harold will be in,’ said Bill. ‘Jim will be in at the birth of our brave new England.’
‘My dad would kill me if I were Labour,’ said Sophie. ‘He says he’s worked too hard to give it all away to the work-shy and the trades unions.’
Tony looked at Bill, and Bill looked at Dennis, and each could tell that the other was thinking the same thing. Here was everything they wanted to bring to the screen, in one neat and beautifully gift-wrapped package, handed to them by a ferocious and undiscovered talent who looked like a star. The class system, men and women and the relationships between them, snobbery, education, the North and the South, politics, the way that a new country seemed to be emerging from the dismal old one that they’d all grown up in.
‘Thank you,’ said Bill to Sophie.
‘Will you let Brian know, then?’ she said.
‘Let him know what?’
‘About, you know … Whether you think I’m right for it.’
The men all laughed, a lot, even Clive.
‘You are it,’ said Bill.
‘But you’d let me do it?’
‘We want you to do it,’ said Tony.
‘I’ve never done anything like this before.’
‘None of us had, until we did,’ said Dennis. ‘I didn’t know the first thing about producing comedy when they gave me The Awkward Squad.’
‘It’s not even worth making a joke,’ said Tony.