Barbara Parker, the central character in Nick Hornby's new novel, Funny Girl, is not a typical beauty queen. For a start, she doesn't actually want to be one. A devoted fan of Lucille Ball, Barbara just wants to make people laugh. And so, just a few minutes after being crowned Miss Blackpool 1964, she gives up her throne and heads to London, where she changes her name to Sophie Straw and gets a lead role in a new sitcom, coincidentally titled Barbara (and Jim).
Soon Barbara, her co-star Clive, the show’s writers Tony and Bill, and their producer Dennis are a tight team, working together to create a comedy that attracts huge audiences every Thursday night. But perhaps inevitably, the bonds between the team eventually start to chafe.
Hornby's first foray into period fiction is a witty, poignant book about comedy, class, collaboration and social change that may be his best novel yet. Barbara, who feels completely at home for the first time when she's working with the Barbara (and Jim) team, is a compelling protagonist. She's a fiercely ambitious but self-aware young woman who sometimes worries if her burning desire to be a comedy star has made her heartless.
Any fears the novel will slump when the focus expands to include the show's creators are dispelled. All the characters manage to hint at comic archetypes while remaining convincing. Tony and Bill (the names surely a homage to Tony Hancock and Bill Kerr, his co-star in the radio version of Hancock's Half Hour) first meet in a police station, having each been arrested in a public lavatory. Bill is gay, but Tony isn't quite sure who or what he wants. Their complicated relationship and that of Tony with his wife June are both depicted with wit and sensitivity. And when the unhappily married Cambridge graduate Dennis and the ludicrously self-important Clive both develop an interest in Sophie, what could have been a predictable love triangle instead feels complex and real.
Comic ability
When writing a novel about comedy, it does help if you have comic ability yourself.
Funny Girl
is, thankfully, a frequently very funny book. At one point Bill, who is developing loftier ambitions, tells Tony that their show has been abandoned by the true artistic rebels, who are “having sex on stage at the Royal Court. Or they’re making underground films about decadent Romantic poets . . . [The smart people] have given up on us.”
“Who are the smart people?” asks Tony.
“The ones having sex on stage at the Royal Court.”
“They’re out on Thursday nights,” says Tony. “We don’t have to worry about them.”
Ever since High Fidelity, I've been irritated by Hornby's depiction of women as somehow immune to fandom; fannish devotion is presented as a male quirk that women are too sensible (or dull) to understand. Funny Girl may be the first time he's ever depicted a woman as a fan, and it works wonderfully. Barbara's passion for the groundbreaking work of Lucille Ball is shown as a crucial part of her life: "everything she did or felt came from that".
Hornby is particularly perceptive when he shows the huge importance of role models to those who don’t see themselves reflected in the world they love. Barbara loves Lucy not just because she’s funny, but because she’s a funny woman. “There were lots of other funny people that she loved: Tony Hancock, Sargeant Bilko, Morcambe and Wise. But she couldn’t be them even if she’d wanted to. They were all men. Tony, Ernie, Eric, Ernie . . . there was nobody called Lucy or Barbara in that lot. There were no funny girls.”
Social amusement
The book is a thoughtful defence of comedy as an art form. Tony loves television comedy partly because “it makes us all a part of something . . . You laugh at the same thing as your mum and your next door neighbour and the television critic of the
Times
.” There’s also a great scene in which Dennis, who knows that there are some in the BBC “who believed that comedy was the enemy”, stands up for his chosen medium on an intellectual panel show with the wonderfully pompous title,
Pipe Smoke
.
And, like the best British sitcoms, Funny Girl is also about class. Barbara, Bill and Tony are all products of a postwar world that saw smart, young working- and lower-middle-class men and women claim their space in the public sphere.
By the time their sitcom ends after four series, Britain has changed even more, and Tony and Barbara are aware they're part of an old guard being superseded by a new, hip generation. But as the book's unsentimental but optimistic conclusion shows, the Barbara (and Jim) gang manage to retain their sense of humour right into the 21st century. In fact, they're all still funny boys – and one very determined funny girl.
Anna Carey's novel Rebecca is Always Right is published by the O'Brien Press
