Therapy

instead, but it didn’t catch on. The only parts of my body that I’m reasonably pleased with are the extremities, the hands and feet. My feet are quite small, size seven, and narrow, with a high instep. They look good in the Italian shoes I buy more frequently than is strictly necessary. I was always light on my feet, considering the bulk they have to support, a nifty dribbler of a football and not a bad ballroom dancer. I move about the house very quietly, sometimes making my wife jump when she turns round and finds me right behind her. My hands are quite small too, but with long, shapely fingers like a pianist’s, not that I can play any keyboard except an IBM one.
     
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    I gave this self-description to Alexandra and she glanced at it and said, “Is this all?” I said it was the longest piece of continuous prose I’d written in years. She said, “It hasn’t any paragraphs, why is that?” and I explained that I was out of practice in writing paragraphs, I was used to writing lines, speeches, so my self-description had come out as a kind of monologue. I said: “I can only write as if I’m speaking to someone.” (It’s true. Take this journal for example — I’ve no intention of letting anybody else read it, but I can only write it as if it’s addressed to a “you”. I’ve no idea who “you” is. Just an imaginary, sympathetic ear.) Alexandra put my self-description away in a drawer to read later. At our next meeting she said it was interesting but very negative. “It’s mostly about what’s wrong with your body, or what you think is wrong with it, and even the two good points you mention, your hands and your feet, are undercut by the references to buying too many shoes and not being able to play the piano.” Alexandra thinks I’m suffering from lack of self-esteem. She’s probably right, though I read in the paper that there’s a lot of it about. There’s something like an epidemic of lack of self-esteem in Britain at the moment. Maybe it has something to do with the recession. Not in my case, though. I’m not in recession. I’m doing fine. I’m well-off. I’m almost rich. The People Next Door, which has been running for five years, is watched by thirteen million people every week, and there’s an American adaptation which is just as successful, and other foreign-language versions all round the globe. Money from these sub-licences pours into my bank account like water from a running tap. So what’s the matter with me? Why aren’t I satisfied? I don’t know.
     
    Alexandra says it’s because I’m a perfectionist. I demand impossibly high standards from myself, so I’m bound to be disappointed. There may be some truth in that. Most people in show business are perfectionists. They may be producing crap, acting in crap, writing crap, but they try and make it perfect crap. That’s the essential difference between us and other people. If you go into the Post Office to buy stamps, the clerk doesn’t aim to give you perfect service. Efficient, maybe, if you’re lucky, but perfect — no. Why should he try? What’s the point? There’s no difference between one first-class stamp and another, and there’s a very limited number of ways in which you can tear them off the sheets and shove them across the counter. He does the same transactions, day in, day out, year in, year out, he’s trapped on a treadmill of repetition. But there’s something special about every single episode of a sitcom, however trite and formulaic it may be, and that’s for two reasons. The first is that nobody needs a sitcom, like they sooner or later need postage stamps, so its only justification for existing is that it gives pleasure, and it won’t do that if it’s exactly the same as last week’s. The second reason is that everyone involved is aware of the first reason, and knows that they’d better make it as good as it possibly can be, or they’ll be out of a job. You’d be surprised how much collective effort and thought goes into every line, every gesture, every reaction shot. In rehearsals, right up to recording, everybody’s thinking: how can we sharpen this, improve that, get an extra laugh there... Then the critics slag you off with a couple of snide sentences. That’s the one drawback of television as a medium: television critics. You see, although I’m lacking in selfesteem, that doesn’t mean to say that I don’t want to be esteemed by others. In