Stephanie Jones: Book Review - Funny Girl by Nick Hornby

The slapstick spirit of Lucille Ball hovers over Nick Hornby’s novel of television production in Swinging London, Funny Girl. As the title suggests, the story centres on the rise to fame of Barbara Parker, who parlays her title of Miss Blackpool 1964 into a new persona – Sophie Straw – and a starring role on a hit sitcom, Barbara (and Jim), which at its peak attracts 18 million viewers and sets a standard for the light-hearted depiction of British domestic life on the small screen.

There’s much more to Funny Girl than the girl, however. Hornby neatly stitches together the biographies and idiosyncrasies of the creatives and suits who orbit around Sophie, breathe life into her nascent career, and endeavour to prolong their own. On decamping from Blackpool hours after becoming a beauty queen, Sophie fails to find a London full of promise. Working in retail and sharing a poky flat, she is forced to conclude that “All you had to do, it seemed, was ask for an inferior version of the life you had before and London would give it to you.”

Inferiority becomes a thing of the past after a chance encounter with talent agent Brian Debenham at cabaret club Talk of the Town. After disposing of her birth name – ‘Straw’ being intended to put men in mind of a roll in the hay – Debenham dispatches Sophie on a series of auditions that lead to paydirt thanks to the efforts of comedy writers Tony Holmes and Bill Gardiner, who have spun their first meeting in a police holding cell in 1959 into a fruitful professional collaboration.

Whatever might have developed between them personally – Bill is gay and Tony best described as sexually confused in a time when it was dangerous for a man to be seen as either – gives way to a mutual respect and bolstering of each other’s will against the mercurial ids and egos of TV stars.

Hornby’s portrayal of Tony’s marriage to the wise, supportive June is touching and provocative, suggestive of how the restrictive sexual mores of the time played out in the bedroom and illustrative of the strict perimeter around women’s work. In the absence of a baby, June can only support Tony, who wonders whether his wife’s gift analyzing scripts and injecting fizz and crackle might be better than sexual compatibility after all.

Hornby is nothing if not arch and incisive, and so it goes that Sophie has a predictable fling with her co-star, the actors and the public struggling alike to separate life from art. The famous are rarely pitied, but Funny Girl highlights the strange plight of those playing beloved characters who enter living rooms hundreds and thousands of times over the course of years; after a time, the actors’ characters are so woven into the public imagination that their real lives are no longer their own.

As Hornby wryly notes, freshness, by definition, cannot be maintained, and the linear structure that leads a tidy progression through each stage and season of Barbara (and Jim) makes the abruptness of the conclusion all the more effective and bittersweet. The story proper is interspersed with script pages, reviews, and contemporary photographs that embed Funny Girl in the anything-is-possible mood of the time and remind us, on a nostalgic final note, that you can’t bottle lightning.