Inconceivable

hers. She wasn’t there, she was at home surrounded by calendars, thermometers, red felt-tip pens and urine. I was lunching at One Nine Oh (so called because it’s situated at 190 Ladbroke Park Gate – brilliant, eh)? One Nine Oh is something of a media haunt and I often lunch there in my capacity as one of the BBC’s most senior and experienced lunch eaters.

My guests were Dog and Fish, a comic double act who seem to be doing quite well on the circuit at the moment. They are two Oxbridge graduates who are of the opinion that current comedy is “completely crap and useless” and what we need is a new, post-comedy comedy. Basically, they want to do for the comic sketch what Techno did for the tune. I asked if that meant you had to be out of your head on drugs to enjoy it and they grinned knowingly and said that, “Yeah, it would help.” I saw their act in Edinburgh and think they’re truly and deeply awful in a very real sense. Time Out, however, says that they are important and mould- breaking (no mention of funny, but that would be selling out), so the BBC must of course beat a path to their door. If for no other reason than that if we don’t Channel Four will get them and yet again look more hip than us.

They told me that they wanted to do a post-modern docusoap sitcom. The idea being that we supply them with cameras and a crew and that they record their lives. Each week they’ll present us with a half-hour of the best bits plus a four-hour version to run through the night “for the real Dog-geeks and Fish-heads”, they said, “the real post-comedy comedy nutters”. They claim that by this means they’ll cut out all that false crap which TV comedy normally gets bogged down in, like scripts and jokes and acting in an amusing manner, and get straight to the raw improvisational bones of their genius.

“Basically, we’re talking about existentialism with knob gags,” is how Fish put it.

Sometimes the irony of my job strikes me quite forcefully. I mean, when I was younger all I ever wanted to do with my life was write comic scripts. Now what I do with my life is commission other people to do it. People whom I have to admit I don’t normally think much of. That’s my tragedy. I mustn’t complain, though. I get to eat a lot of excellent lunch.

Anyway. Lucy’s call came along with the starters. Finally, it seemed, after days of intense numbercrunching, the ovulation result had come up and we were on. By a curious coincidence I’d ordered Oeufs Benedict to begin my meal. Her eggs were ready at exactly the same time as mine.

I hate mobiles but Lucy had made me buy one for just such a circumstance as this. I’m going to have to work out the volume control, though, because unless I’m being paranoid her voice seemed to be being broadcast through the restaurant PA.

“Sam, I think I’m ovulating. Come home and fuck me now.”

Well, people may have heard and they may not have heard, but either way they could not have helped but hear my reply, which was intended to be in a whisper but emerged as a sort of loud gasp.

“Fuck you? I’m in a meeting.”

Dog and Fish smiled broadly at this and I could tell that in the delicate dance of mutual respect I was losing ground somewhat. Thinking fast, I repeated what I’d said but with a different emphasis.

“Fuck you! I’m in a meeting.”

Dog and Fish laughed out loud at that and Lucy must have heard them because she absolutely made me promise not to tell them what she was phoning about. She thought they’d write a post-modern, apres-comedy sketch about it. They wouldn’t, of course; the subject did not come within their frame of reference, the single and only thing of interest to Dog and Fish being Dog and Fish.

It was all very well for Lucy to swear me to silence but she was also demanding that I jack in the lunch immediately and hurry home. It’s not an easy situation to think up a decent excuse for. I mean cancelling a meeting is easy. Anyone can cancel a meeting. People do it to me all the time. But attending a meeting, a meeting that has been set up for months and then suddenly getting an abrupt phonecall after which you leap up from the table and leave your busy and highly fashionable companions to dine alone, that requires an explanation. What do you say? All I could do was act casual and try to keep it ambiguous.

“Sorry,” I said. “My wife is ovulating and she wants seeing to.”

Not great, but the best I could do at the time. In fact I think they thought it was a joke.

“Nice one, geezer,” they said and laughed in a grunty, cynical, fag-ashy kind of a way.

I left a credit card number with the Maitre d’ to cover Dog and Fish’s lunch and grabbed a taxi. All the way home I tried to think erotic thoughts, knowing what would be required of me the moment I walked through the door.

Sure enough, when I got home Lucy was already in bed. It’s all very well for her. Nobody minds at the agency if she skips a day. Most of her clients only do voiceover work anyway, which is all fixed fee. Personally I think that all Lucy and the other women in that agency do all day is gossip, but I’m not allowed to say that, of course.

“Come on! Come on!” she was shouting. “The pee traffic light is green! My temperature is optimum and all the little red dots have collided!! My eggs are done now! They’ll be hard boiled in a minute!”

Oh, the pressure.

Great steaming shitballs, I hate myself sometimes. All month I’d been wanting a shag and now of course I get stagefright. Well, who wouldn’t? It isn’t easy to get a hard-on when your partner is desperately staring at her watch and bleakly contemplating a lonely and emotionally unfulfilled life of childlessness ahead. An unkind God seemed suddenly to have replaced my dick with a small piece of warm, flesh-coloured plasticine. “Lifeless” would have been a compliment. Lucy tried her best, of course, but it wasn’t much help. I knew that all she was thinking was, “Come on, get hard, you bastard. My eggs are on the turn.”

We succeeded in the end. I managed to just about sustain a sort of semi-half-master until achieving a lacklustre orgasm. More of a boregasm really. Words cannot describe how annoyed with myself I was. I felt really unmanned and that I’d let Lucy down. She said it was all right, but without a great deal of conviction. I told her that I didn’t think I’d produced enough but she said it didn’t need much. “It’s quality, not quantity,” she said, which was nice of her.

Dear Penny

It was Bonk Day today, the culmination of Restricted Bonking Month. This sort of thing is definitely not good for the sex life. I mean sex ought to be spontaneous and erotic, not contrived and mechanical, but what could I do? I needed servicing and there’s an end to it. I could see that Sam was a bit upset afterwards. I fear that he feels he’s being used like some kind of farmyard animal. Nothing more than a breeding stud, brutally milked for his sperm. Not that he was much of a stud today. Frankly, I’ve seen harder knobs on the door of a bouncy castle. For a minute there I thought he wasn’t going to pull it off. I used all my womanly wiles, even “going down” on him as they say, something I’ve never been big on. Well, I’m just not very good at it, I never really know what to do. I mean you put it in your mouth, and then what? Chew? You certainly aren’t supposed to blow, despite the name of the exercise. Anyway, he did not respond at all well and it was marshmallow in a slot machine time, I’m afraid.

It was all rather disheartening really, Penny. I mean I don’t aspire to being a sex bomb but a girl does rather hope to be able to provoke an erection in her husband. It was the pressure, of course. After all my calculations he knew he had to produce the goods. Difficult for him, I’m sure, but as a woman with feelings I do rather wish it hadn’t appeared quite such an ordeal.

Anyway, long story short and all that, honour was satisfied. Sam says that all he can say is that if we do score this month the kid will be a strong swimmer because its dad certainly didn’t give it much of a start.

When we’d finished he rushed off, of course. I asked him not to because I think it’s important to spend a bit of time together after sex or else it’s just sex, isn’t it? But Sam said he had to go back to work, which, considering he claims his job consists entirely of telling arseholes how clever they are, didn’t seem like much of an excuse to me. I told him that at times like these we should make an effort to concentrate on the emotional side of our relationship, otherwise our love life will be nothing more than a mechanical thing, devoid of sensuality and romance. He said, “Right, yes, romance, absolutely right,” and left.

When I got back to TV Centre there were three messages to ring Aiden Fumet, Dog and Fish’s manager. He’s also the manager of about sixteen other acts whom Time Out and the Guardian have sequentially announced as “quite simply the best in Britain today”. Aiden