You will probably remember Barbara, the pneumatic, kinetic Blackpool lass who leapt, thrillingly, through the screen and into our living rooms, from a recent and especially noteworthy episode of Comedy Playhouse; you may even remember Jim – or, as the title of the show cruelly has it, (Jim), who was lucky enough to pick her up in the West End pub where she was working. Jim is now her handsome but hapless Home Counties husband, and he works for Mr Wilson at 10 Downing Street. But now Barbara (and indeed Jim) have been given their own BBC Television series, they will be as hard to forget as one’s own immediate family.
We are, of course, talking about a comedy series here, and therefore one should hesitate before invoking the practitioners of other, greater, art-forms. But the superb work of Tony Holmes and Bill Gardiner (who wrote the popular but generic radio show The Awkward Squad), with its careful attention to the cadences and rhythms of ordinary speech, and its affection for the sorts of people who, until the last few years, have been under-represented in any form of drama or fiction, brings to mind the work of Messrs Braine, Barstow and Sillitoe; none of these writers, however, are famous for their jokes, as yet, so one must of course acknowledge the debt that Mr Holmes and Mr Gardiner owe to Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, and perhaps even to Kingsley Amis.
There is, as yet, no Galton and Simpson series that attempts to deal with the relationships between men and women, however, specifically the relationships between husbands and wives; nor have the creators of Hancock’s Half Hour yet ventured north of Watford to find their characters. Mr Holmes and Mr Gardiner, both from London, have to these ears provided Sophie Straw, the young and hitherto unknown actress who plays Barbara, with strikingly authentic dialogue; she must be thanking her lucky stars for their ears every single day she goes into work. But then, she has repaid them in heaped spades, because Miss Straw is the most extraordinarily gifted comic actress I have seen since the war. She could not shine as she does without the subtle, unshowy but nonetheless impressive work of Clive Richardson, another Awkward Squad alumnus, but Miss Straw is a revelation, and the soul of the series.
Last night’s episode revealed, startlingly, that the marriage between Barbara and Jim had not yet been consummated – a sorry state of affairs that had clearly been remedied by the end of the programme, when we were presented with the ecstatic and amusingly metaphorical bongs of Big Ben. Indeed, the revelation may be too startling for some, and one suspects that, as we speak, the Director-General of the BBC will be looking with some dismay at thousands of green-inked letters asking him to resign. He should on no account do so. The very existence of Barbara (and Jim) indicates the birth of a modern Britain, one prepared to acknowledge that its citizens are as sex-obsessed as our neighbours across the Channel, and that those who have not received the benefit of a public school or university education are just as likely to make clever, amusing observations as those who have – maybe more so, if poor old Jim is any guide. This marriage can, over time, come to contain everything we have only just begun to think about in Britain; perhaps we would have done so sooner, had not the war and the long years of austerity intervened. Barbara (and Jim) could not be better, funnier or more congenial guides to a decade that seems, finally, to be shaking off the dead hand of its predecessor.
The Times, 11 December 1964
9
The interview galvanized her, and anyway she hated the idea that she might get caught out in a lie, so she found a flat in the neighbourhood she’d already described – to Diane and the readers of Crush – as home: in Kensington Church Street, just up the hill from Derry and Toms. Sophie could walk out of the front door and be buying cosmetics at her old counter within ten minutes, if she wanted to. And it was only a little bit further on to Biba in Abingdon Road. She walked there on the first morning she woke up in her own bed and bought herself a brown pinstripe dress.
Marjorie seemed to be under the impression that they would be moving together.
‘Oh,’ said Sophie. ‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well,’ said Sophie. ‘It’s only got one bedroom.’
‘This place has only got one bedroom.’
‘Yes,’ said Sophie. ‘But I didn’t think either of us liked it that way.’
‘I don’t,’ said Marjorie. ‘I wish you were moving into a place with two bedrooms.’
Sophie hadn’t really thought of Marjorie as a dependant, someone she’d be carting around until Marjorie got married, or got promoted, or got her own television series.
‘We never talked about staying together,’ said Sophie.
‘I didn’t think we needed to,’ said Marjorie. ‘I thought it was just one of those things.’
‘No,’ said Sophie. ‘It’s not.’
That degree of firmness felt uncomfortable, and Marjorie could tell.
‘You are lucky,’ said Marjorie.
‘I know.’
‘I don’t think you do.’
‘I do.’
‘It’s all looks,’ said Marjorie. ‘Honestly, I’d cut your face and bust off and put them on me if I thought it would make any difference. I don’t know what I’d do about your waist. You can’t steal waists, more’s the pity.’
Oh dear, thought Sophie. Not this again. She couldn’t share a flat with Marjorie any longer, not with all the sharp implements around.