‘You should be with her,’ said Bev.
There was no wistfulness in her voice. She seemed to be speaking as a television fan, rather than as a lover.
‘Do you think?’
‘Yes. Can you imagine?’
‘Imagine what?’
‘You’d be like the Burton and Taylor of the BBC. Everyone would go mad.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘Well, I’d love it, and I’m lying in bed with you.’
It was quite a persuasive observation.
Clive took Sophie to the Trattoo, just down the road from Sophie’s new flat, on a Saturday night, after the technical rehearsal for the fourth episode. He told her that Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers ate there all the time, but there was no sign of either of them. And in the absence of any proper celebrities, heads turned when they walked into the restaurant and people started whispering. And because the sight of the other diners whispering was so startling, Clive and Sophie started whispering too.
‘Are they whispering because we walked in?’ said Sophie.
‘I think so,’ said Clive.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Sophie.
‘I know,’ said Clive.
‘Has that ever happened to you before?’
‘Because of my radio work on The Awkward Squad, you mean?’
‘This is so odd. What do we do?’
A lady on the table behind Clive’s shoulder smiled at her. Sophie smiled back.
‘Give them something to talk about.’
He took Sophie’s hands in his and looked into her eyes. The whispering in the room didn’t get louder, because the people were all very well dressed and well behaved, but it got faster: the s’s all got squished up together until the room sounded like the African bush, and Sophie had a giggling fit. Clive looked hurt.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Did you mean that?’
‘Well,’ he said. ‘I did, rather.’
And that was how their relationship began. There was more to it than that, of course. There was wine, and delicious food, and Sophie deciding that Clive was actually very handsome indeed. After dinner, they walked up the road hand in hand, and she invited him in, and they drank some more, and then they went into her bedroom and he made love to her. There were no difficulties whatsoever, so Clive didn’t mind Sophie referring jokily to Jim’s first-episode nerves afterwards. But it didn’t seem quite the same, when they were on their own. It was rather as if the point of them had been lost. They couldn’t give the people what they wanted, if there were no people around to receive the gift.
Towards the end of the series, Tony and Bill found themselves running out of inspiration and straying back dangerously close to Gambols territory. All they had for the last episode was an idea about a new secretary starting in Jim’s office at Number Ten.
‘Let me guess,’ said Clive when he saw the title page of the script. ‘Jim employs a new secretary and Barbara gets jealous.’
Tony and Bill didn’t say anything.
‘Oh, Christ,’ said Clive.
‘Line by line it’s funny,’ said Bill.
Clive closed his eyes and opened a page at random.
‘Don’t do that, you bastard,’ said Tony.
‘If it’s funny line by line …’
‘Yes, but you’ll read it out in a way that destroys it.’
‘Is that what I normally do, then? Thanks a lot.’
He read one of his lines out anyway.
‘ “I haven’t even noticed whether she’s a man or a woman.” ’
There was a silence round the table.
‘Shall I try it again? “I haven’t even noticed whether she’s a man or a woman.” Give me a little help here,’ said Clive. ‘Tell me how to wring maximum mirth out of that particular gag.’
‘Don’t be daft, Clive. You know that’s not how it works.’
‘It’s just a boring situation,’ said Clive. ‘The new secretary has been done to death.’
‘You haven’t read it. How do you know we haven’t found something new in it?’
Tony groaned.
‘What did you say that for?’ he said to Bill. ‘You know we haven’t.’
‘I hadn’t seen this script until just now,’ said Clive. ‘But let me tell you what’s in it.’
He was given no encouragement, but he went ahead anyway.
‘Jim hires a new secretary. Barbara gets it into her head that this secretary has the looks of Marilyn Monroe and the morals of Fanny Hill. She makes an excuse to visit Jim at the office. It turns out that the new secretary is a fat Sunday School teacher with a harelip and three-inch-thick specs.’
This time there was a long, long silence.
‘You won’t be happy until we’ve hung ourselves, will you?’ said Tony.
‘It’s a lot of cock,’ said Clive. ‘You’ve gone back to the Gambols. George Gambol seems to get a new secretary every third week.’
The Gambols were becoming a disease, like the measles or the mumps. The moment Barbara started feeling jealous, or Jim started spending too long tinkering with his car, Tony and Bill knew that their script wasn’t feeling very well.