Ben Elton - Inconceivable

So, feeling all hot and bothered I announced myself at the reception desk. Most embarrassing.

“ Hello. I’ve come to see if my vagina poisons my husband’s sperm.”

I didn’t actually say that but the receptionist knew anyway. She smiled wearily and told me to take a seat. There were two or three other women waiting as well and I must say it felt very strange and slightly creepy knowing that we’d all been shagged within the previous hour or two and that we were all desperately trying to hang on to the dollop within.

As it happens, the clinic was very good and got through us quite quickly. I only had time to get halfway through a fascinating article in Woman’s Own about Prince Andrew’s exciting engagement to his new fiancee Sarah Ferguson, who is known to her friends as Fergie. I must say medical waiting rooms are incredibly nostalgic places. They are the only places where you can pretend that the Princess of Wales is still alive. I got quite sad all over again just thinking about that dreadful Sunday when she died.

So anyway, then it was into the torture chamber and all the usual appalling cervical intrusions, legs up in the stirrups, fanny prised apart, invaded and inspected. “Ah, well,” I thought, “another day, another duck-billed battering ram shoved up my poked, prodded and provoked privates.” There was a student there as well, having a good old stare.

I hate that!

I absolutely loathe it. I mean I know they have to learn and all that but I really can do without spotty teenagers wanting to mess around between my legs. It reminded me of being back at school.

Anyway, what with one thing and another I was in a foul mood as they slapped on the freezing cold lubrication and the doctor shoved up his horrid contraption, cold again, of course, and began scraping out my cervix. And what did he say? Well, of course, he said what they always say.

“ Do try to relax.”

Oh well, of course. A perfect stranger is sticking bits of cold, greasy metal up your vagina, staring deep within, tutting in a worried manner and then asking an adolescent boy what he thinks of it, but do try to relax.

I always want to say, “Sit on a traffic cone, mate, and you try to relax,” which would be brilliant and utterly unanswerable, but of course I never do.

Well, anyway, it turns out that Sam had not disgraced himself. There was enough of the stuff up me for the test and to my surprise I got the result immediately. Normally these things take ages to come through but amazingly the doctor whipped his spatula out of me, slapped the smear under the microscope and gave me the result there and then. Satisfactory, he said. Everything had turned out fine. Except, that is, for the fact that when he extracted the metal duck it made a disgusting loud wet raspberry noise, which was excruciatingly embarrassing. It’s all that jelly they use and he used far too much. Every time I braked on the way home I slid off the car seat.

Anyway, as I say, long story short ( EastEnders is nearly starting and the new barmaid is considering turning to prostitution to support her child. Juicy, or what?), the news is good. Sam and I are definitely chemically compatible. My juices do not reject his seed (although he’s been such a pig lately I would not blame them if they did!). I am of course very pleased about this because despite his being a pig I do love him and I had been dreading having to pop round to our gay friends with a turkey baster and asking them to fill it full of sperm.

So there we are. It seems that compatibility is not the problem. Nor is my ovulation and nor is the motility of his sperm.

And yet we are still not preg! Why? WHY? Bloody why?

It is completely baffling and most distressing. What’s more, we’re running out of options. I fear a laparoscopy looms. Oh, shit. The very thought of a doctor inserting a television camera into my bellybutton makes my knees wobble! I’m not good with bellybuttons at the best of times; they make me go funny. I won’t even let Sam kiss mine (not that he’s offered to in years) and now I must face the prospect of a CNN news team clambering through it and sending back live bulletins from my ovaries.

I can scarcely believe I’m going to write this but I’m beginning to seriously think about Drusilla’s theory re: ley lines and Primrose Hill. She does seem very certain of her facts. Shagging in Highgate is less conducive to connecting with the ancient forces of rejuvenation and fertility than shagging on Primrose Hill. I know that Drusilla is a witch but she’s a good witch, which is a very different thing from the wicked variety.

Dear etc.

Well, this morning was a pressure job all right, our postcoital compatibility test. Doctor’s orders. Shag and then straight round to the clinic to check the juices. Not much fun for the woman certainly but let me tell you it’s a horrible situation for the bloke who is called upon to provide the wherewithal. I mean it’s not ideal, is it? Sex on demand is tricky enough at the best of times, but in the morning, particularly after a big night at the Director General’s, it’s a very tough call indeed. The truth is we haven’t done it on a weekday morning in years, well you don’t, do you? We’re not bloody students, are we?

Besides which, the whole problem was compounded by the fact that we slept through the alarm, dammit, and I happened to have a particularly early and rather important meeting.

Lucy says, “When don’t you have a meeting?” But actually that’s not true. I am, in fact, often there at her beck and call. The point is when I am available to her she’s not interested. She’s only interested in presuming on my time when she knows I have other things to do.

So, what with the hangover (which I think I managed to disguise from Lucy), the earliness of the hour, and the impending meeting, instant and impressive erections were not massively in evidence.

Lucy tried to be nice about it but quite frankly she didn’t try very hard. I don’t think women have any idea how difficult it can be. They think that because most men seem to have erections pretty much all the time we can summon them up at will. They do not understand that when it comes to dicks, the captain is not in control of the ship.

Lucy said, “I cannot believe this! Every morning you have a horn you could hang a bath-towel on. What’s the problem now?”

She simply doesn’t understand. I admit, of course, that on almost every other morning of my life I have woken up with an erection but that, and this is the point, is because I didn’t need one .

It really is unfair. Any bloke can get a stiffy when he doesn’t need one, and of course he almost always does. On buses; in the checkout queue at Sainsbury’s; anywhere, really. But what women do not understand is that these unasked-for horns are normally not bonking horns but useless, sexless, pointless, unlooked-for protrusions.

Anyway the point I’m making is that the dick has a mind of its own, considering itself entirely autonomous and impervious to orders from the bridge. This is something that women need to understand, something that they should be told by their mothers at an early age. The fact is simply this: trying to tell a knob what to do is the very last thing it will appreciate or respond to.

I’m going on a bit, I know, but the injustice of the situation moves me deeply. Anyway, we pulled it off in the end, so to speak, but it was a very, very close-run thing.

I did, however, manage to make my meeting, which I was pleased about because it was a special one, concerning as it did Nigel’s major new film-making initiative, an area in which considering my current standing with the Controller I cannot afford to screw up. Actually, I was rather excited about it. After all, film is film and we humble telly people do not normally get to dabble in so exalted a medium.