BOOK REVIEWS
The always entertaining Nick Hornby serves up a breezy novel that revisits the Swinging Sixties through a sitcom.
In Funny Girl, Nick Hornby uses the story of a reluctant beauty queen from Blackpool as the hook for a rambunctious cultural history of British television comedy 50 years ago. As befits a novel about a popular sitcom, this novel packs in lots of laughs, but it’s also got more heft than Hornby’s readers might expect. Its story begins in 1964, when the standards for everything that Britain found funny, familiar, thrilling and off limits were drastically changing. And its characters create the biggest hit on the BBC with a show that’s a sign of its times.
Funny Girl begins with the spectacle of Barbara Parker, an aspiring comic actress who realises that being elected Miss Blackpool is a terrible career move. She ditches the title within an hour of winning it. Then she considers the job opportunities open to buxom blondes of the era: flirting with men as a department store employee, club hostess or model. Barbara resembles the real-life starlet and model Sabrina, also from Blackpool, whose huge bust is depicted in an ad for a slide projector that is one of the book’s witty illustrations; this is one of many well-chosen period photographs that enliven the book. “Sabrina demonstrates the world’s finest projection equipment,” the ad copy reads, in part.
What’s a girl to do in such a professional environment? Barbara can’t be the next Twiggy — and besides, her role model is Lucille Ball. So she heads for London, hellbent on pursuing her acting ambitions. Hornby manages to make her wilfulness appealing because there is absolutely no artifice to her, and because she’s as blithely witty as she is determined. In no time, she has won over a BBC director and a pair of writers who like her so much that they decide to shape a show around her. Hornby credits the comedy writing team of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson with influencing his work in general and this book in particular. Among their credits is Comedy Playhouse, the first show on which Hornby has Barbara appear. By then she has taken the stage name Sophie Straw (which suggests a roll in the hay to her terrified agent, who constantly insists on identifying himself as a happily married man). But once the novel’s fictitious writers, Bill and Tony, start dreaming up a sitcom for her, they give her character the name Barbara without realising that was her original moniker. They give her a spouse named Jim. And just to make it clear who’s the stellar character, Jim’s name winds up in parentheses in the title. A lot of wry antics surround the creation of Barbara (and Jim), many of them involving the odiousness of the actor who plays Jim. His name is Clive Richardson, and he does not fancy taking a back seat to any rookie. Nor does he like the fact that the writers, besotted with Sophie, have given her all the good gags, leaving him to play surly straight man. In any case, something about the chemistry among writers, actors and their producer-director, the married and slightly older Dennis Maxwell-Bishop, really clicks. And though we don’t exactly see how it works, we’re told that they create a sitcom so fresh and timely that all of Britain is riveted to the telly.
Naturally, real life intrudes on the show. Much of the novel emphasises how the actors’ problems make their way into the scripts, especially after the first blush of inspiration has dimmed. Of particular interest — and, really, a lot more so than Sophie — are Bill and Tony, two gay men who are closely bound by friendship and collegiality as the book begins, only to see that bond unravel as changing times challenge them. Bill is true to his gay identity, no matter what risk that entails (the book begins at a time when gay sex is still a crime in Britain). That leads him to travel in more culturally daring circles than Tony, who has settled into a sham of a bourgeois marriage. Tony rather likes his wife, but he has never been honest with her.
Tony and Bill drift further apart as the sexual revolution arrives full force, several seasons into the run of Barbara (and Jim). By then they have given Barbara and Jim a marriage counsellor, Dennis’ marriage has broken up, Hair has come to town and formerly repressed executives are feeling like kids in a candy store. Hornby neatly folds all these changes into the show’s vacillating fortunes and the rise of its gutsier challenger: Till Death Do Us Part, which in its American version would be known as All in the Family.
As in any Hornby novel, the mood stays breezy and the conventional romantic seeds are planted. It’s pretty clear that Sophie ought to stay away from her cad of a co-star and that the shy, donnish Dennis — who begins the book as a bearded Cambridge type whose unfaithful wife is a snob with no sense of humour — is madly in love with her. Only when Funny Girl tacks on a coda is there anything truly poignant here, and that’s strictly about the passage of time. The swinging London that the book recalls is 50 years in the past. When Sophie first arrived there, the equivalent nostalgic time leap was back to the start of World War I.