It took her a month. She listened to Any Questions? and she talked to anyone who showed the slightest bit of interest in what was going on in the world. She bought the New Statesman and the Listener, because Bill told her to, and made herself read three articles a week. She didn’t understand everything, but she came to understand that Bill was right: everyone thought that her father’s views were poisonous rubbish. Feeling sorry for Ian Smith, or complaining about the coloured problem, was like saying you preferred ‘How Much is That Doggie in the Window’ to ‘Twist and Shout’. And, in the end, that was all the education she needed. She wasn’t sure that the people she worked with and listened to and admired were right about everything, and as she got older it only became more confusing. But she had learned that, to her friends and colleagues, all the things her father believed were as musty and unattractive as a trouser suit in a department store sale. You could refuse to care about fashion if you wanted to, but if you were going to spend all your time in the company of with-it people, you needed to know when they were laughing at you.
Bill had cared a lot about viewing figures, once upon a time. But after ‘The New Bathroom’ he began to crave the approval of people who would never be caught dead watching a popular BBC comedy programme. He wanted to be respected by the people he saw at the fringe theatre shows, and by the producers of the satirical shows who were turning down his sketches. He wanted to impress the clever young homosexuals he picked up in the arts clubs, and even the television critics who had loved the show once but who hadn’t bothered writing about it since the first series. He and Tony had had all that once upon a time, and they’d lost it, and hadn’t worried about the loss very much. They needed love, then, as much as they could shovel in, and love came from an enormous popular audience. Now they had grown fat on love, and Bill found himself looking enviously at the social realists and the surrealists and the experimentalists and the satirists who would always be scrawny and pale. It was all to do with money, he supposed. He had it now and he didn’t need quite so much of it as he did, and anyway he had the means to make more whenever he wanted. So of course he’d set his sights on something else entirely.
But the things he wanted weren’t going to come with Barbara (and Jim), and ‘The Arrival’ made matters worse. He wasn’t particularly proud of the work, although it had done a job: labour pains, Jim lost in a meeting, a catastrophically nervous taxi driver, a midwife – played by Sandra with surprising charm and spirit – who wanted Barbara to join her in estimating the royal family’s grocery needs, and then a baby, and love. Out of the corner of his eye, Bill noticed that Tony was weeping during the recording, although he managed not to let anyone else see him at it. Bill felt only a slight sense of self-disgust. They got their highest viewing figures to date; as it turned out, they got the highest viewing figures they would ever get. Before the recording, someone in the press office borrowed a baby, a real one, from a girl in Contracts, so that Sophie could pose for pictures with her newborn. (He was indeed a boy – Timothy, to be known as Timmy.) Most of the popular papers carried the pictures before the broadcast. And, as Bill had feared, Timmy the baby made everything harder. The christening episode was good: they invented a vicar who had lost his faith, but who was too lazy, elderly and unqualified to do anything else. And ‘The Soirée’ had some good things in it too. Jim invites an old college friend and his wife round for dinner, and decides that he has to take over the cooking after Barbara tells him what she has planned. Jim doesn’t say as much, but he’s clearly worried that Barbara’s menu is too plain, too old-fashioned, too English. The first half of the episode, Bill thought, was sharp and fresh, and poked fun both at Barbara’s working-class insularity and Jim’s middle-class aspirations. But then they lost their nerve and went back to the safety of ‘The New Bathroom’; in the second half, the front two rows of the audience had to be provided with waterproof mackintoshes as a protection against flying béchamel sauce, much to their giddy excitement. Dennis told them afterwards that his superiors had loved the cooking part and hated all the chat beforehand: the headline note from on high was ‘More Béchamel Sauce, Less Elizabeth David’.
‘Nobody else I know is doing this stuff,’ he said to Tony. ‘They’re all trying to upset their parents, not entertain them.’
‘By doing what?’
‘They’re having sex onstage at the Royal Court. Or they’re making underground films about decadent Romantic poets.’
‘Nobody’s stopping you,’ said Tony. ‘You can go off and earn three bob in your spare time whenever you want. And during the day you can write the most popular comedy series in Britain.’
‘It isn’t the most popular comedy series in Britain with everyone.’
‘No. Half the country isn’t watching us. I can live with that.’
‘Except the other half contains all the smart people. They’ve given up on us.’
‘Who are the smart people?’
‘The people having sex onstage at the Royal Court.’
‘They’re out on Thursday nights,’ said Tony. ‘We don’t have to worry about them.’