Therapy

painted an institutional slime green and curdled cream, like Rummidge General Hospital, and the windows are barred and glazed with grimy frosted glass. There’s the usual job-lot of miscellaneous furniture pushed against the walls or arranged in the various “rooms”: splay-legged Formica-topped tables, plastic stacking chairs, collapsing three-piece suites, and beds with unsavoury-looking mattresses. Apart from the trestle table in one corner with a coffee machine, soft drinks, fruit and snacks laid out on it, the place could be a Salvation Army refuge or a depository for second-hand furniture. The actors wear old, comfortable clothes — all except Debbie, who always looks as if she’s on her way to be photographed for Vogue — and when they aren’t required for a scene they sit slumped in the broken-down chairs, reading newspapers and paperback novels, doing crosswords, knitting or, in Debbie’s case, embroidering.
    But they all look up and give me a cheerful smile and greeting as I come in. “Hi, Tubby! How’re you? How goes it?” Actors are always very punctilious that way. Most producers and directors secretly despise writers, regarding them as mere drudges whose job it is to provide the raw material for the exercise of their own creativity, necessary evils who must be kept firmly in their place. Actors, however, regard writers with respect, even a certain awe. They know that the Writer is the ultimate source of the lines without which they themselves are impotent; and they know that, in the case of a long-running series, it is in his power to enhance or reduce the importance of their roles in episodes as yet unwritten. So they usually go out of their way to be nice to him.
    This week they’re doing Episode Seven of the present series, due to be transmitted in five weeks’ time. Do they, I wonder, have any inkling that this may be the last series? No, I detect no signs of anxiety in their eyes or body language as we exchange greetings. Only between Debbie and myself does a message flash briefly, as I stoop to kiss her cheek where she sits in an old armchair, doing her eternal embroidery, and our eyes meet: she knows that I know that she wants out. Otherwise the secret seems to be safe for the time being. Not even Hal Lipkin, the director, knows yet. He bustles over to me as soon as I come in, frowning and biting his ballpen, but it’s a query about the script that’s on his mind.
    Sitcom is pure television, a combination of continuity and novelty. The continuity comes from the basic “situation” — in our case, two families with radically different lifestyles living next door to each other: the happy-go-lucky, welfare-sponging Davises, having unexpectedly inherited a house in a gentrified inner-city street, decide to move into it instead of selling it, to the ill-concealed dismay of their next-door neighbours, the cultured, middle-class, Guardian -reading Springfields. The viewers quickly become familiar with the characters and look forward to watching them behave in exactly the same way, every week, like their own relatives. The novelty comes from the story each episode tells. The art of sitcom is finding new stories to tell, week after week, within the familiar framework. It can’t be a very complicated story, because you’ve only got twenty-five minutes to tell it in and, for both budgetary and technical reasons, most of the action must take place in the same studio set.
    I was looking forward to seeing this week’s episode in production, because it’s one of those cases where we approach the territory of serious drama. Basically sitcom is light, family entertainment, which aims to amuse and divert the viewers, not to disturb and upset them. But if it doesn’t occasionally touch on the deeper, darker side of life, however glancingly, then the audience won’t believe in the characters and will lose interest in their fortunes. This week’s episode centres on the Springfields’ teenage daughter, Alice, who’s about sixteen. When the series started five years ago, she was about fifteen. Phoebe Osborne, who plays her, was fourteen when she started and is now nineteen, but fortunately she hasn’t grown much in that time and it’s amazing what make-up and hairstyling can do. Adult characters in long-running sitcoms lead enchanted lives, they never age, but with the juveniles you have to allow for a certain amount of growth in the actors, and build it into the script. When young Mark