Ben Elton - Inconceivable

“‘But as a part of you, as an extension and expression of our love, that I do want and if it happened, I’d be delighted. No, I’d be more than delighted. I’d be in Heaven.’” Phipps sort of paused here and looked into Nimnh’s eyes. I swear they’d both gone a bit teary, both the actors, that is, not both Nimnh’s eyes, although that as well, obviously. I’d heard that actors achieve the watery-eyed look by pulling at the hairs in their noses but if they did that they did it bloody slyly because I didn’t notice. Anyway, then Carl took Nimnh’s hand and said, “But if it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t. That’s how I see it. If we have children it’ll be another part of us, our love. If we don’t then we’ll still have us and our love will be no less whole.”

Well, it’s exactly how I feel about Lucy. Not surprising, really, seeing as how I wrote it, but still, it was very moving. Even George, who’s a tough, thick-skinned bastard, seemed quite emotional. He told me that it was good stuff and I told him that I’d meant every word of it.

After that Ewan called a short break and went off to sit in magnificent, moody isolation while cute girls with spiky hair and yellow-tinted glasses brought him coffee. All the actors and crew made a beeline for the tea and biscuit table as actors and crew always do. I decided to introduce myself to Nimnh who, being an actress, was holding a cup of hot water into which she was jiggling some noxious herbal teabag or other.

“Hi, I’m the writer. I’m so glad you’ve decided to do this, Nimnn… Nhimmn… Nmnhm…”

Of course it was only then that I realized I’d forgotten to check up on how to pronounce the woman’s name and that I had absolutely no idea. I think she was used to it. Well she would be, wouldn’t she?

“It’s pronounced Nahve. It’s ancient Celtic,” she said and there was a delightful hint of Irish in her voice which I could tell she was rather proud of. “I feel my Celtic roots very deeply. My family hail from the bleak and beautiful Western Isles of the Isle of Ireland. My blood is deep, deep green.”

Well there’s no answer to that, as they say. As it happens, I didn’t need one because just then Carl came up, all blokey and matey.

“I’m Carl. You’re Sam, aren’t you? I know your wife slightly. She works at my agency.”

Yes, you know her slightly, mate, I thought, and slightly is as much as you’re ever going to know her, you lying sneaking bastard.

“Tremendous script, mate,” Carl continued. “Really tremendous.”

I thanked him and then when his back was turned managed to surreptitiously put ketchup in his tea. A small but important victory. Then the PA called the company back to rehearse. As Nimnh passed me she pointed to the script and the speech Ewan wanted to look at.

“I cried when I first read it,” she said.

The terrible thing is, so did I.

I’d only just put it into the script that morning. I couldn’t put it in earlier because Lucy hadn’t written it. She takes her book to Spannerfield and if the queue’s long, which it normally is, she sometimes jots down her thoughts.

Nimnh sat on a chair in the middle of the rehearsal room, with a pen and a book in her hand (I’ve even used that device in the film. It acts as a sort of narration), and read the speech.

“‘I don’t know. As we get closer to the day that will either see me reborn or on which I’ll just die a bit more, the longing inside me seems to become almost physical, as if I’ve swallowed something big and heavy and very slightly poisonous. A sort of morning sickness for the barren and unfulfilled. Do I dare to hope that perhaps soon the longing will end?’”

I could hardly bear it. Nimnh was reading the speech (and reading it very well), but all I could hear was Lucy. All I could see was Lucy, sitting in a crowded waiting room all alone. Scribbling down her thoughts, thoughts I was now making public.

“‘… every mother and child I see begs that question, a simultaneous moment of exultation and despair. Every pregnancy is a beacon of hope and also a cruel reminder that for the present at least there is nothing inside me except the longing. And perhaps there never will be. I don’t know why it is that women feel such a deep need to create life from within themselves, to yearn for a time in which their own flesh will bring them comfort, but I know that they do. That’s the one experience that women who have children easily miss out on in life… The intensely female grief which accompanies the fear that those children might never exist.’”

Everyone was very positive about the speech. Ewan loves the way I’m “building the script in layers”, as he calls it. George said that he really felt I’d cracked the female protagonist.

“Nothing to do with me, mate,” I told him. “Didn’t I tell you? I took on a woman co-writer.”

Dear Penny

I’ve just re-read some of the stuff I’ve been writing recently and quite frankly I’m a bit embarrassed. Mawkish, self-pitying drivel. I’m sorry I bored you with it. All that stuff about the “longing within” and “morning sickness for the barren”. Great Christ, three-quarters of the world is starving! How can I be so self-indulgent? All I can say is thank GOD no one will ever, ever read it. Still, it does help to get it all out, even if I do sound like an absolute whinger.

I went for another blood test today as per. That’s about it. Nothing else to tell.

Not long now. My ovaries feel like sacks of potatoes having got about fifty eggs on them apiece.

Dear Sam

I’ve now officially handed in my notice at BBC Radio. It’ll mean going into debt because the advance they’ve given me for my film is nothing like enough to keep us, but it has to be done. I’ve taken so many days off in the last couple of months that they’d even begun to notice at Broadcasting House. Normally, if you don’t push your luck they’ll let you bumble on until you retire but even they have limits so I thought I’d better go before I was pushed.

I dropped in on Charlie Stone’s studio on my last morning, to say goodbye.

“Right, OK, nice one,” he said. “Who are you?”

Which is, I think, a fitting epitaph for my career in youth broadcasting.

I haven’t told Lucy about me chucking my job. How can I? She hasn’t got the faintest idea what I’m up to. Oh well, one lie more or less won’t hurt.

There was a big script conference today prior to commencement of principal photography. It was held at Above The Line in Soho because Ewan didn’t want to schlep all the way out to White City. Therefore George and Trevor and even Nigel had to schlep into town. Interesting, that. It strikes me that Nigel’s not as tough as he’d like to think he is. The BBC are putting up most of the money but Nigel lets the Corporation get treated like junior partners to three haircuts with half a rented floor in Soho.

And why?

Film, that’s why. The whole world is bewitched by film, the inimitable glamour of the silver screen. Or at least the whole of the London media world, which is the whole world as far as we who live in it are concerned. All other narrative art forms have come to be seen as drab and joyless compared to film. Novels, theatre, TV? All right in their way, but in the final analysis boring. Boring and old-fashioned, to be seen as a stepping stone, no more than that, a stepping stone into the only real place to be, the glorious world of film! If a novelist writes a novel the first question his first interviewer will ask is, “Will it be made into a movie?” If an actor gets a part in a ten-million-pound TV mini series they’ll say to their friends, “Of course it’s only telly.” The directors of subsidized art theatres sweat out their time commissioning plays which are as much like movies as four actors and a chair will allow them to be, waiting for that longed-for day when they’ll have amassed enough credibility to get out of theatre and into film. It’s Hollywood, you see. After ninety years we’re all still mesmerized. We still want to get there. Nobody working at the BBC is going to get to Hollywood but somebody from Above The Line might and in Ewan’s case will. Which is why we come to him.