Backlisted - It Had To Be You by David Nobbs

Episode Date: December 28, 2015

Andy Miller and John Mitchinson, a/k/a/ Leavis & Butthead, return with another episode of the podcast which gives new life to old books. In this episode they're joined by Jonathan Coe, author of The Rotter's Club and Oh! What A Carve Up amongst others, to discuss the life and work of David Nobbs, best known as the creator of Reginald Perrin. Timings: (may differ due to adverts)2'12 - Finnegans Wake by James Joyce 9'08 - The Holly Tree - Charles Dickens 16'34 - It Had To Be You by David Nobbs* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm* If you'd like to support the show, receive the show early and get extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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coming out of a shop and walking down the road he is isn't he I've decided I saw Ringo Starr today looking fit and well I'm going to, I've decided I saw Ringo Starr today looking fit and well. I'm 70 blah. And I didn't give him a thumbs up. I should have done the peace sign, peace and love.

Double thumbs up. Double thumbs up. That's for Macca. All right. Peace sign for Ringo. Macca going. Hundreds of pictures of him going. Really.

People are so. I saw Ringo Starr on the King's Road once with Barbara Bach, so are they still together? Yes, they absolutely are. Amazing. Yeah, this was a long time ago, but... Sort of inertia or something. I don't know what's keeping them together. They both filmed little pieces to camera

for that nation's favourite Beatles song thing that was on a few weeks ago. And Ringo's looking pretty good. You know, he's looking pretty fit. I think it's probably because nobody loves him better. Noises off. You really have got to be a certain age to get that. 70s Spy Who Loved Me fans. Hello and welcome to Backlisted. I'm John Mitchinson and we're coming to you live from the kitchen table of Unbound,

the website where readers and writers meet to create great books. Hello everyone, my name's Andy Miller. I'm the author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. John and I are the Leavis and Butthead of the book world. I have to tell you, John, I've had a complaint about that joke this week. What was the complaint? It's not funny tell you, John, I've had a complaint about that joke this week. What was the complaint? It's not funny. Well, that's...

But I've said in the Stuart Lee manner we will continue selling it week after week until it becomes funny. Well, it's only remotely funny if A, you know who Beavis and Butthead are and B, if you know who F.R. Leavis is. I'm confident... Which I suppose a tiny...

I'm confident everyone listening to this is familiar with at least one of those. Right, why don't we start with you this week, Andy. Andy, what have you been reading? Thanks, John. I've been reading the book Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce, as you do, or as you don't. It's almost like I can hear little inverted commas in your voice around the word reading. I have been reading. I read 20 pages of it every morning when I get up. Sort of calisthenics for the brain. Yes, scourer for the brain. I've read everything else pretty much written by James Joyce,

and I really liked the idea of working my way through a book that is widely held to be never read I know two people who've read it and I very much like the idea of being the third person I know who's read it all the way through so I'm 428 pages into it and I've got 200 pages to go who's counting I will be and i'll be reading it on christmas morning so happy christmas everyone when we were talking to linda last podcast we did i was saying oh the thing about reading fitting as wake it's a bit like a prog rock solo it's like this endless wiggly wiggly wee thing that goes on forever and ever and ever and ever but it's not i've changed i've revised my opinion it's more like reading trout mask my opinion. It's more like reading Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart.

And like Trout Mask Replica, it's like being... The reader is like a member of the Magic Band. Do you know how Captain Beefheart recorded Trout Mask Replica? I don't. OK, well, he basically kept the Magic Band hostage in a house for six months. He made them all sleep in one room, and every morning he would get Zoot Horn Rollo, and he would say to him,

I've got a new song, and he'd bang out this atonal thing on the piano, and then Zoot Horn Rollo would have to go next door to where the band were sleeping, eating only rice, and have to learn these incredibly strange and intricate and elusive songs in multiple time signatures and when i started reading finnigan's wake i felt a bit like how am i ever going to get my head around this it's like listening to some very strange piece of music but as i've got more into it i think like that beef heart like stockholm syndrome is set in

i find really i'm not not enjoying it i'm actually beginning to really enjoy it and i've just gone back and reread the first few pages which seemed like gobbledygook to me the first time i read them and and now they they're really beginning to make sense there's something really wonderful about it we've actually got a clip, I think, of Joyce reading a page of Finnegan's Wake. So we're just going to listen to that now. Don't you, Kenner, for heaven I told you every telling has a tailing, and that's

the he and the she of it. Look, look, the dusk is growing. My branch has lost its taking root and my cold chair has gone ashly. Feel you. Feel you. What age is that? It soon is late. and my cold chair's gone ashley. Philo, Philo. What age is that? It soon is late.

Tis endless now since I or I or one last saw Waterhouse's clock. They took it asunder, I heard them sigh. When will they reassemble it? Oh, my back, my back, my back. I'd want to go to Aix-les-Pains. In time, there's the bell for sex aloitus. A concept of this in the spray.

Time. Ring out the clothes, ring in the dew. God of Ari, vert the showers and grant I a grace. Amen. Will we spread them here now? Aye, we will. Flip. Spread on your bank and I'll spread mine on mine.

So that's Joyce reading from Finnegan's Way. And I actually, when I got to that chapter, I read that along with Jim. And I really wish that he'd found the time, having spent 17 years writing it, that he'd found the time to read the whole thing. Because actually, when you listen to him read it, and you read along with it,

you realize how many of the references are meant to be heard rather than read and how musical it is as well. Anthony Burgess, who loved it, thought it was a comic masterpiece, said it was a book where you could laugh out loud on almost every page. Is that something you've found?

There's a quote. I have to say, full disclosure, I have looked at Finnegan's Wake many times. I have read bits of it. Yeah. And I was a huge, huge Joyce fan. And I've read Ulysses more than once. But I just...

T.S. Eliot famously called it the great dead end of literature. And Nabokov called it the snore in the next room. But do you feel it's improving your sense of something, your sense of perception? I mean, it is like you say, it's a riff, isn't it? It's a sort of endless... Yeah, I really like the idea of someone who's basically faced down any accusations of self-indulgence

and gone, well, I'm just going to ignore any of that. I'm just going to do what I want. It's the most determined attempt to write only about what James Joyce wanted to write about in the way James Joyce wanted to write about it. Can I ask, so last podcast you read Stephen Hawking's previous year's Trimester, another book that famously nobody's ever read, and you found a factual inaccuracy on my back.

I did. A couple of pages. I did. Have you found any factual inaccuracies so far in Finnegan's Wake? I'll be honest with you, Matt, it's hard to tell. I've also got a reader's guide to Finnegan's Wake, which requires its own reader's guide. It's the most.

I know, I have that as well, and that was the thing that put me off. But I love this, Beckett said this. Beckett wrote a long and very good thing about it. What was it called? Our factification round his incameration of work in progress. But Beckett, I like this. Basically, Beckett seems to suggest that it's an object you should have on your mantelpiece. He said, you cannot complain that this stuff is not written in English.

It's not written at all. It's not to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something. It is that something itself. The thing is, that's actually perfectly true. I must say, I'm really finding the experience of reading it really worthwhile and really valuable. Because, you know, you're... I feel confident talking about it

before i finish reading it because it's not like something's going to happen at the end it's going to radically alter my view of it it's like being immersed an appropriate you know watery image for the wake but it's like being immersed in this stream of of language it's terrific i must just add one final thing about it. There's a Burgess quote on the back of my copy, which says, this is the most entertaining book ever written. I just get a vision of somebody

going on holiday, they've got £10 in their pocket, they go into the bookshop, they go, I want something fun, this is good, this is £8.99, and it's the most entertaining book ever written. I just imagine the lawyers' letters flying to Anthony Burgess. But what have you been reading, John? Well, it's this time of year, and I have to say this is December 2015,

and I always try and read a bit of Dickens that I haven't read before. So I was reading some of his minor Christmas works. A couple of them, really, I enjoyed hugely. One was called... That was minor Christmas work. Not A Christmas Carol, which I have to say, I confess utterly, I totally love Christmas Carol. And it was also, it's a book that totally transformed,

I mean, invented Christmas. The whole thing about Dickens inventing Christmas, which we could go on and on about. But I quite like the whole idea that he had it, it was delivered to him, downloaded to him, and he wandered around when all sober folks had gone to bed and broke out, as he described himself, like a madman and sort of wrote it very, very quickly.

And he'd written it basically to make money, which it didn't at first and then did. But I just liked the idea that it kicked off this mad idea, which was that he would go and read. So when he performed it for the first time, it was a three-hour performance in Birmingham, of all places, and he was a crowd of 2,000 people. And he would stand up there, and that was the first time really anybody had done a major public reading. And kind of, you know, he performed all

the exciting bits. But what I particularly liked on his reading days, Dickens would drink two tablespoons of rum mixed with cream for breakfast, a pint of champagne for tea, and half an hour before he went on stage would knock back a sherry with a raw egg beaten into it. During the five-minute interval, he liked a cup of beef tea and later on headed to boat with a bowl of soup. He liked to perform in full evening dress

with a bright red flower in his buttonhole, purple waistcoat and watch chain, and he had a team of six people. I mean, it was serious going on tour, and he made an absolute fortune. I read Claire Tomlin's biography of Dickens, which was published two or three years ago. And it's remarkable when you read that, when you see how many things he did.

He's writing, he's campaigning, he's drinking champagne for breakfast, he's encouraging his friends to visit him in Broadstairs. It's amazing he didn't die at the age of 25. And he was massively influential. One of the ones I read, it's called The Holly Tree, and like Christmas Carol is four staves, this is three branches. And it starts with the most brilliant description, one of the best descriptions of getting up early in the morning

in the freezing cold and getting on a coach and coming out of London. And basically what happens is the guy, he's leaving London because he thinks he's discovered that his girlfriend actually prefers his best friend to him and he goes up north and gets snowed in in an inn called the Holly Tree and then actually discovers while he's there

that in fact there was a huge misunderstanding and the girl actually loved him. After all he goes back and marries her and they have kids and live happily ever after so it's one of those wonderful, you know, Dickens doing. But what I love, the power of Dickens is he read this for the first time in the States as a live reading. It was published in 1855. And it was so impressed the people of Boston that one of the publishers in Boston's wife decided to set up a series of not-for-profit restaurants called Holly Tree Inns, which became hugely successful.

I mean, it's just one reading of Dickens, and suddenly there's a whole entrepreneurial chain. And apparently Holly Tree Inns were known well into the 20th century as a place where poor people could go. So that's one. And there was another lovely monologue, Mrs Liripa's Lodgings, which is one of those great Dickensian landladies.

Yes, I remember. Hesperus published a lovely edition of it recently with an introduction by Philip Hensher. It may become more germane as we come to talk about David Nobbs. There is that thing of transformation in Dickens. You take a character and either it's the supernatural or it's extremes of weather, or they meet elements of

their past and it's those once those things are revealed to them it creates a new possibility for the future and i think that's sort of maybe a tenuous link to tenuous link open up the meat of us i just want to say i have read those two stories but but but this is a this is a moot point to which i suspect we will return frequently in the weeks ahead. I've read, I think I've read all of Dickens. But I haven't read a chunk of it. Not the letters. All the journalism.

All the fiction, fiction, fiction. I think I've read, let me modify my brag. I only ask that because I tell you one of the things that Michael Holroyd once told me. He said he discovered that Bernard Shaw, of which he was writing the great, magnificent biography, he said that because Shaw had a secretary, he figured out that Shaw could write more words in a day than he, Michael Holroyd, could read in a day. And that's a really terrifying statistic for a biographer to have to juggle with. terrifying statistic for a biographer to have to

juggle it. But I just, as someone who has read all the fiction of Dickens, fiction, didn't let me finish. But I read it when I was 20. I'm 47. I can't remember it. You know, I can't, it's like, I read, I think I read

Martin Chuzzlewit. I know I've read Martin Chuzzlewit. I can't tell you anything about it. I know, it's like the old Woody Allen line. I took a speed reading course. I've just finished War and Peace. It's about Russia. I think of Pickwick Papers, which I remember loving.

I'd say it's about drinking brandy, buttered rum in inns in early Victorian England. I can't really remember. And yet, the feel of a book really stays with you, I think. So if you go back and read that now, you read Pickwick Papers now, the thing that would come back to you, I think,

is the feeling of it rather than the specifics of it. All I will say is I have gone back several times to read Great Expectations. It's my favourite novel. And every time I read it, it's... You should never read those things when you're in your teens. It's particularly Great Expectations. It's much more interesting reading it in your 50s. You know what?

The thing is, I've come to the conclusion in the last few years that there's not really any point reading anything before you're 40. Because, first of all, you're not really going to understand it because you haven't lived enough, right? And the second thing is, if you're really when you're 20, you're going to have forgotten it by now anyway. So you should just live a bit. Exactly.

Live a bit. Have a bit of experience. Exactly. That's the sound of a man popping on a pipe for everybody. That was very good. But I just cry all the time. That's the thing I find. I cry at almost anything now.

Yes, you go easily. Did you go in either of these stories? No, not in these, but I did. I cried. I had a little bit of a tear at the end of the knobs. I cried during the knobs. That seems like the weeping men. We'll now hand over to

the hard man Coe. We're delighted to be joined by the novelist Jonathan Coe. Hello, Jonathan. Hello there. Jonathan is the author, of course, of What's Carved Up, The Rotter's Club, House of Sleep, and many more. Oh, there's too numerous to mention the phrase you're reaching for, Hank. And also the biographer, of course, of B.S. Johnson, the wonderful book Like a Fiery Elephant.

Brilliant. And you've just published a new novel called Number Eleven, which is your eleventh novel. Sort of. Is that right? Sort of. That's why I called it Number Eleven. But then I did realise afterwards that I wrote a little children's book, which has not been published in the UK. It's only published in

French and Italian. Wow. So actually, it's kind of my twelfth book. Oh, you've written that. Sound of a publisher's ears pricking up. Not published here, you say? Indeed. We'll pick this up again after some marvelously witty and interesting adverts. Discover more value than ever at Loblaws.

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See in-store for details. Conditions may apply. See in store for details. We're here to talk about a great favourite of mine and yours, the author David Nobbs, who sadly passed away earlier this year. And I noticed that in the finished copies of No. 11 that the book is dedicated to David, which I thought was a lovely thing. Dedicated to his memory, yes. Yeah, David, as you said, died in August this year. And the first inkling I had of his death, yes. Yeah, David, as you said, died in August this year, and the first

inkling I had of his death, actually, because we'd been in touch fairly regularly, but not for the last few months, the first inkling I had was a tweet from you, because I was on a coach in France, looking at my Twitter feed, and you'd quoted a passage from his last book,

The Second Life of Sally Mosham. And I thought, oh, that's nice. And he's quoting bits of David Nobbs. And I scrolled down a bit and I saw other people were talking about David Nobbs as well. And I got that sinking feeling that there's only one reason why suddenly everybody's talking about the same person. Something must have happened to him. Cover your ears, everyone. I think my actual tweet expressing a great truth was fucking hell David Nobbs is gone.

But yes. And, you know, I'd known him since the mid-90s, late 90s, something like that probably. And we'd become quite good friends and one of the things we got into the habit of was sending each other's

books, usually shortly before they were about to be published, kind of publish as advanced copies. And we would comment on each other's latest books and this kind of thing. And I realized that, you know, I was really going to miss many things about him, but that dialogue in particular, really. And I think David was a very tactful person, but also a very honest person. And you knew from his emails whether he actually liked the book. You said so or not. I think of the close circle, he said,

Thank you, Jonathan, I did enjoy this book, even though as a writer you did everything you could to stop me in trying it. He sent me a lovely note. Before The Year of Reign Dangerously was published, we sent him a copy and he very kindly read it and sent me a lovely note, which I choose to believe he liked. He said, you know, I found the book funny and I found it provocative and all those things,

but he said a lovely thing at the end, which is he said, I just wanted to send you this note and say thank you for the pleasure that you've given me. And I thought that was a very David-ish thing to do, to specifically thank someone for having entertained them and made them laugh. Well, pleasure and entertainment were a very important component of literature as far as David was concerned.

He spent most of his life entertaining people in one way or another, both on television and radio and in his novels. So, you know, he felt that very keenly himself. It was one of the first things he looked for in a book as a reader, was pleasure. I'm just going to, for the benefit of people listening who aren't familiar with David, I'm just going to give a very short potted biography.

David was born in 1935 in Petswood, educated at Marlborough and Cambridge, then became a reporter for the Sheffield Star, which I think he used later in... In Pratt think he used later in Pratt of the Argus and then in the early 60s he became a contributor to that was the week that was and that was his kind of entree into the world

of sketch writing, he wrote for Frost and then he wrote for Kenneth Williams Frankie Howard, Les Dawson and the two Ronnies, you would be familiar with a couple of the sketches because they're very very famous that he wrote for the two Ronnies, you would be familiar with a couple of the sketches, because they're very, very famous, that he wrote for the two Ronnies. Such as the... The Complete Rook. That's right, the Complete Rook.

The restaurant which only has Rook-related... Yeah. And the mispronounced worms. That was him as well. He didn't do the Mastermind one, with the... No, that's David Rennick. That's right, yeah. And his co-writer for some of this was Barry Cryer, that's right, isn't it?

Yes, he wrote with Barry Cryer. I want to talk specifically about David as a novelist as we go on, but he was also writing novels. He wrote 20 novels in total, the first published in 1965, the last published in 2014. His most famous book is probably The Death of Reginald Perrin, subsequently adapted for television

as The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin. Fall and Rise. Oh, I failed. Oh, I've let myself down. You see what he was doing there, though, eh? Yes, and he also wrote radio plays, radio series. He adapted your novel, What a Carve-Up.

For the radio, he did, for Radio 4. A great eight-part adaptation on Radio 4. And he wrote a memoir called I Didn't Get Where I Am Today. Of course. Of course I didn't get where I am today. But he was also a humanist. He was a long-standing patron of the British Humanist Association. And that's really the book that you suggested that we all read prior to talking about this

is a novel that he published in 2011 when he was 75 called It Had To Be You. Yeah, he had an amazing kind of flowering as a novelist, really, in his 70s. I think he published six or seven novels in his 70s. And particularly the last four, actually, just sort of poured out of him almost at yearly intervals. And they're pretty long, substantial pieces of work. You can also sense a kind of deepening and increasing richness and seriousness in his writing, actually.

I mean, the books are still funny, but they aren't as funny as the original Perrin or Henry Pratt novels. I don't see that as a criticism, but I think David was changing and evolving as a writer. And in fact, many years ago, when I reviewed him for the Sunday Times, I made this very bold statement, which the then literary editor for the Sunday Times actually phoned me up and invited me to withdraw from the end of the review. I said... I said that

David Long was probably our finest post-war comic novelist. The word probably, of course, is the huge... is the huge let-out clause there. And this was duly plonked on the front cover of every book he published since, I think, including It Had to Be You.

But towards the end, David asked for it to be taken off. And he said, you know, it's nothing personal, Jonathan, but I don't want to be regarded as a comic novelist anymore. That's not how I think of myself. I just want to be thought of as a novelist. And he felt the term was a bit diminishing, really. And with It Had to Be You, I think you can see where he's coming from because it's a very, very serious novel.

I'm just going to read the... This is going to become a backlisted tradition and we're going to read the blurb on the back of each book. So no spoilers for those of you who haven't read it. And that's good, not because we haven't read it. No, we've all read it. Oh, yeah. Summer is in full swing and it is one of those heady Wimbledon summers.

Strawberries and champers couldn't be further from James Hollinghurst's mind because his life is about to be turned upside down. Running a dwindling business and acting as patriarch of a dysfunctional family is stressful enough, but when tragedy strikes, it is only the start of James Myriad's problems. Myriad, that's very good. His daughter Charlotte won't speak to him, an old flame has reared her head,

and he just has to do something about his PA Marsha. And then, of course, there's Helen. Dot, dot, dot. It had to be you as a comic and dark portrait of a good man who has done bad things and is about to realise that even death can't conceal the most hidden of truths. John, do you want to say...

This is my first. I was a knobs virgin until this. And I have to say, I really, really enjoyed this book and actually will definitely go and read more of his work. Comic is such a difficult word, isn't it? Because if you're talking about Shakespeare's comedies and Shakespeare's tragedies, it means one thing. But if you're talking about writing knob gags for television, it means something quite different.

This is a proper grown-up novel about serious things. It starts with... I think we're allowed to say there's no point really trying to hide the plot too much, but it starts with the protagonist's wife being killed in a head-on accident. And it's about dealing with, as much as anything else, the practical... What I love about it is the practical details

of how you deal with some major tragedy and how you mentally... The book really is about him coming to terms with the loss of a wife, a wife who he has been for five years previously unfaithful to. I don't think I've read anything that's been quite as convincing and by the end really deeply moving about that process of grief. But beyond that, the thing that I sort of really realised

that other than Jonathan's own work, lower middle class, sort of suburbia, you realise how little of it there is in English fiction and how peculiar that is. I mean, I guess, you know, there's quite a lot of chick lit that is set in that milieu, but not a lot of what I would call serious fiction. And although it's a comic in the biggest sense of the word...

Oh, I agree. ..it's not... He's not, I would say, it's not comedy. It's not laugh at that. There are plenty of novels set in the inner city and there are plenty of novels set in Hamp inner city and there are plenty of novels set in Hampstead but there are precious few set in Surbiton Or Purley

Where most people live What is it about the world of packaging that makes it so right for something coming out of the office and this It's that great scene where he gives the speech towards the end where he's having to stand in front of her

and he's kind of addled by grief at this point and he has to stand up in front of her and he gives this fantastic speech and what's the line where he's sort of saying, you know, I work in the world of packaging. And it was said, do you fancy a fuck? I think that's what's going through his head. And I think the one thing he put out, he doesn't actually say that in the speech in front of his boss. He actually says, you know, what are you doing a fuck? I think that's what's going through his head. And I think the one thing he put out, he doesn't actually say that in the speech in front of his boss.

He actually says, you know, what are you doing next Thursday? It's got all of that glob pack, which is the name of the company. It still has that lovely Reggie Perrin. And I'm speaking as somebody who hasn't read the novels, only seen the television twice. So I know one of the things that will come up is that the reggie perrin novels are actually a lot darker than than they they appeared in in television but i indeed

i felt he was brilliant i mean i thought the way it was structured was really well there was maybe one plot line too many i'm not sure we needed the murder yeah okay i'm not going to tell you anymore jonathan did you have a a bit that you wanted to read? Yeah, I was just going to read a little bit of dialogue between the hero, or the anti-hero, whatever you want to call him, James Hollinghurst, and the vicar who has come round to discuss the funeral arrangements. Vicar.

And I... Yes. And, you know, I do agree with you about how rare it is to see, you know, these kind of scenes in modern fiction, really. And to me, that's about David's warmth as a writer and his willingness to find kind of drama and greatness in these banal settings. I mean, as the guy making the speech about packaging says, you know, somebody has to package things. We're actually doing something incredibly important here, and at the same time

these people are full of kind of grandiose hopes and dreams just like everybody else. So it's the disjunction between those. Isn't it? It's a great theme in David's work. Yes, absolutely. So yes, this is the dialogue between James and the Reverend Martin Vigar.

The Reverend Martin Vigar had sparse hair, which he'd carefully combed to cover as much of his pate as possible. He was very tall and walked with the slight stoop of a man who doesn't want to intimidate his fellow mortals. James couldn't believe that he was so pleased to welcome a vicar to his home. Then anything that took his mind off the evening to come was welcome. In fact, the vicar fascinated him. When on being offered a cup of tea, he replied, that would be quite delightful, the cup that cheers. And no, no,

no, no sugar, thank you. I'm sweet enough already. He was every inch a vicar and as arch as a bishop. But when they went into the living room and he got a wad of A4 and a ballpoint pen out of his briefcase, his voice lost its trace of sing-song and developed a hint of North Kent, and his business-like manner led James to expect that at any moment he would say, now, life insurance, you adequately covered? This prompted him to say, quite a change of career you had, to which the vicar replied with a smile, yes, straight from Mammon to God. Did you, did you, you know, get a sudden call, as it were? The Reverend Martin Vigar gave a self-deprecating smile, nothing as dramatic as a call, he said, more of sudden call, as it were? The Reverend Martin Vigar gave a self-deprecating smile.

Nothing as dramatic as a call, he said, more of a whisper in my ear. I suppose increasingly over the years I began to feel the need for a meaning to life, and particularly to my life. And have you found that meaning? The vicar hesitated. It isn't as clear-cut as that, he said. I am finding it. It's a process, a long process, not always an easy process.

He turned suddenly grave. I'm so sorry that my first visit to your lovely home should be for such a sad reason. Thank you. He produced a sheet of paper and handed it to James, and again it felt as though it would be a quote for insurance. The order of service. I think it has agreed, but I thought we should check before it, this is in inverted commas, goes to print. James looked through it carefully. Yes, that's fine. I had a very good talk with your brother, Philip. He seemed a very nice man. He's great.

That's so good to hear in this time of crisis for the family. James was beginning to realize that there were a lot of inverted commas in the vicar's life. He emphasized that you are not, in essence, a religious family. James was careful not to fall into his catchphrase, not to say, I'm sorry. He felt very strongly that this was nothing to apologise for. No, we're not. In fact, I'll be honest with you. After we'd arranged all the details, I wondered if we should have gone for a humanist service.

Ah, yes, the woodland burial route. Well, let me reassure you, Mr Hollinghurst, this will be a Christian funeral service, but it will not be pious. It will be, if I may put it like that, soft on God. Very low church, very C of E, you might say. In my eulogy, I will touch upon the message of eternal life, but I won't, quote, rub it in. Thank you.

Then James found himself approaching three words that he would find difficult to utter with a straight face. More tea, Vicar? That's so good, isn't it? It's genius. It's so good. It's so great that you picked that section, the humanist section, because Matt and I were talking earlier about this book.

Matt had read it, and Matt was saying it had turned out differently. The plot had turned out differently from how he was expecting. I don't want to give the ending away, but there aren't any more deaths before the end of the book. And there is an implication that perhaps we might expect one or two more before the end of the book. what happens to James is really what David wanted to write about, that he has a journey from, I suppose, some kind of queasy agnosticism to a sort of convinced humanism. And I found this quote from David,

which he gave around the time this book was published. He said, I believe there are just as many Christian virtues to be found among the faithless as the faithful. Furthermore, these qualities are explored and developed along individual paths. We have no God whom we can burden with the responsibilities of our actions. Loss of faith. It sounds so negative. I didn't lose faith. I gained faith. Faith in people. I didn't lose faith, I gained faith, faith in people. And I think that's, David's clearly writing in this novel,

I don't know if it's totally autobiographical, but there is a similar path of enlightenment expressed, as you say, in a packaging firm around a suburban funeral in the space of a week. I think it is a highly autobiographical book, actually. And we can talk about this because he comes clean about it in his own autobiography that towards the end of his first marriage, he was unfaithful to his first wife. He felt terrible guilt about this. And I think he chose a really interesting way in this book to write about grief in the character of a man whose wife dies a sudden death and his initial feeling is relief and freedom, a kind of horrible, guilt-ridden sense of relief

and that he can go straight to his mistress and say, great, we can now spend the rest of our lives together. And readers who are looking for that easy, kind of likeable central character to identify with and root for from the beginning of the novel are in trouble with this book because James is quite dislikable at some point and kind of hypocritical. But David, as you say, traces a very beautiful trajectory for him, I think, from that sense of complicated, guilt-ridden, hypocritical, fucked-upness at the beginning of the book. And heavy drinking, actually. There's a lot of alcohol consumed in this book.

Screaming at the radio is a thing. I wondered if you could drink along with this book and how quite smashed you'd be at the end of it. Charles Dickens could, but I'm not sure the rest of us could and the screaming at the radio bit was who hasn't sat in their car and berated the radio for using the wrong word I also like his toast

routines in the morning one of David's great skills as any kind of writer, TV writer novelist is he's brilliant on comedy of repetition. Yeah. And there's a motif in this, again,

there's a motif about toast in this book, which sounds very unpromising as I say it, which is cumulatively brilliant as the book goes on. Yeah, and he's very good at this. I was just thinking about the vicar, because the vicar, I think I'm allowed, not giving too much away to say, the vicar having promised that he is, I think I'm allowed, not giving too much of a word to say, the vicar having promised

that he is, you know, so low church, and the vicar turns out to be a dreadful ham in the funeral. I just want to read this a little bit, because this is a brilliant paragraph, I think, wonderfully written. A humorous note

crept into the vicar's voice, like a mouse into a platter of cheeses, as he related a vaguely amusing anecdote with which James had primed him. No, James wanted to cry. Don't signal the joke. You'll kill it, frail thing that it is. He closed his ears to it. He couldn't bear to hear it, but he did hear the faint flitter of laughter that passed through the congregation like a breeze through a spinny. through a spinny, yes I spotted that wonderful, and that is just absolutely then he says rapidly

stifled as the Reverend Martin Vigar slipped back into evangelism but it's I mean I think that's one of the things that's so joyful about the book is that you know there are these without drawing attention to his style at all

he's just he is he's both very funny but he at the end there's a fantastic kind of piece at the end where he's standing in the garden and incredibly moving and incredibly true and right i think jonathan was referring to the fact that david wrote how many novels in his last 10 years of seven seven i think yeah in novels, he liked to do... He was quite pleased with doing something different every time that he hadn't done before. So he published a novel in 2008 called Cupid's Dart, which is the first novel that he'd written in the first person.

He wrote Obstacles to Young Love in 2010. That's the first he'd written in the present tense. It Had To Be You is the first that he'd written that took place over a short period of time. That he likes to set himself slightly new frameworks so as not to get bored and so as not to bore the reader.

I wonder if we could go back and talk a little bit about Reginald Perrin. Reginald Perrin is the first of David's books that I read. I think it's the first you read, isn't it, Jonathan? It's the first that everybody reads, I think, a lot of the time. And, yeah, I mean, I don't know how it was for you, but the TV series came on air in 1976,

and after two or three episodes, I just went straight out to WH Smith, as it was then, my local town, and bought the Penguin Time TV version and immediately noticed how different it was from the television series. I mean, the first half of the book follows the same narrative contours, but the tone is darker, and towards the end it gets more surreal, and, you know, Ridge's desperation is more intense and uncomfortable and less comic than it was.

It's the story of a man having a nervous breakdown. Yeah. Midlife crisis turning into a nervous breakdown, right? And it's very funny. But I think one of the things that was very clear when David died was that the success of his television work had detracted somewhat from his reputation as a novelist plus i think a general unease in britain particularly with the idea that things can be both funny and serious at the same time and for me you know in my own work and jonathan i think in your books as well one of the things I got from David when I

read Reginald Perry and his subsequent books is the ease with which he mixes comedy and all other things as though because that's what life is like, life isn't it doesn't not have comedy in it. Well there's a lovely

part somewhere in the book in it had to be where he talks about the desire, wishing there was more gentleness in TV drama. I always thought that one of the great things about Reggie Perrin, and I'm sort of interested to know a little bit about that, because I haven't read the books. I've heard people say, for example,

that Martin Clunes actually is a more believable Reggie Perrin than Leonard Rossiter, although it's really difficult if you've got the Leonard Rossiter performance in your head to ever kind of separate it, because he was a great comic actor. But that idea of a man, you know, having a nervous breakdown, sort of darker side to it, that Clunes gets that better.

But I wondered, do the catchphrases, they can't be obviously as sort of metronomic in the book as they are in the book. They're almost as metronomic. Because they are in life, aren't they? They are in life. That's how people talk. Oh, I didn't get where I am today, Andy. Super. Yeah.

I'm just not a podcast kind of person. I'm just not a catchphrase person. Yeah. And so on. I think Leonard Ross was brilliant brilliant as Reggie actually but I do wonder what it would have been like with Ronnie Barker which was Daisy's first choice of casting. He

was tied up with Porridge during those years and couldn't take on another major sitcom. But it's interesting why we don't, I don't really feel we produce sitcoms that have got that broad massive popular appeal that the Porridges and the Reggie Perrins... Jonathan, was David bothered by his diminished reputation as a novelist?

No, not at all. I mean, I think he may have made life easier for him in his negotiations with publishers and so on if he'd, you know, on a purely practical basis, if his reputation, if he'd had a know on a purely practical basis if his reputation if he'd had a rock solid reputation as a novelist but he was very very grateful for his fame uh as a tv writer very very proud not just of the of the uh of the reggie perrin series but a bit of a do as well and just you know the sketches he wrote he genuinely saw no division between high and low

culture i don't think and was was just as, pleased with himself at the end of a working morning if he'd produced a beautiful paragraph like the one that John read out or if he'd produced a really good knob gag for Les Dawson. Yeah, but I think his readers really appreciate that. People I've known over the years who love David's work feel they were getting something from David in terms of both entertainment and being thought-provoking that they don't get from many other writers and for me that's the great the great strength yeah in his novel writing plus the fact he never stands still we've got a clip of David talking about one of his later novels and

the dilemma of titling novels can we just if we could listen to that, that would be great. Hello again. Exciting news. Next week I'm starting on writing my 19th novel, The Coppinger Scandal. Well, I say The Coppinger Scandal, but my lovely publishers Harper do have a habit of changing the titles of my books. They'll probably end up being called something like Sex on the Kitchen Table. Actually, that's a much better title. something like Sex on the Kitchen Table. Actually, that's a much better title.

OK, he refers in that clip to a novel called, I think, The Coppinger Affair. Coppinger Crisis. Coppinger Crisis, yeah. And he says, you know, my publishers will have other ideas. And they did. They did, yes. When the novel was published, it was published as? The Fall and Rise of Gordon Coppinger, yeah.

They got it right. Obvious cashing reasons, which is, that's not such a big deal in a way, but I do think it's a great shame that they changed the title of It Had To Be You because it was supposed to be called Life After Deborah, which to me is a great title and tells you what the book is about. Well, I don't actually. And it had to be you. What does it mean, It Had To Be You? Well, you know, I was rereading this book this week

and waiting for the moment where the song came in or a phrase came in or something. I hadn't thought that was perfect. Completely meaningless. Yeah. This would be an even more memorable book if it had David's title. In terms of his influence on you, Jonathan,

was it as simple as after you'd gone to WH Smith, presumably when you were quite young, and read Reggie Brennan, did you think, I want to write books like that? Was it sort of that straightforward a thing? I was already writing books a bit like that. But then I started to write books that were really like that, I think. I mean, if it was 1976, we're talking about early 1976,

I suppose, and I would have been 14. And I think I also read Catch-22 that year. And those two books, in their completely different ways, made me think, not consciously, but on some level that, OK, so you can be serious and funny at the same time. Yes. This combination is possible. And from that point on, I was trying to find my own way of doing that, which took many, many years. But Reginald Perrin was certainly one of the main things that sent me on that route. Andy Hamilton, who's another Nobbs fan, said exactly that.

He said, you know, life, he said, is both funny and serious. And usually at the same time that he said you know life he said is both funny and serious and usually at the same time he said it's only marketing departments that want to that want to separate those two things and i think that is a problem i can kind of see why you know having comic novelists on the front of your book is it's a bit like you know talking to pd james or ruth rendell back in the day and they were all saying well we're never going to win the Booker Prize because we're we write crime novels and you think it's it's sort of a ridiculous distinction isn't it if you if you read it either of those two in particular and and yet at the same time I mean David's ability to turn a comic phrase I'm a big fan of the third Reggie Perrin book The Better World of Reginald Perrin which which contains... Which is not a good

television series, I don't think. No, it's the one, I'm going to just explain what it is. It's the one where they open a commune. I'm just going to read a little bit from that. Because the second one is Grot, right? Yeah, the second one is Grot. Which is great. But it has a phrase in this book to describe Christmas Day.

Christmas Day was grey, still and silent, as if the weather had gone to spend the holidays with its family. I mean, you know, that's Woodhouse. That's very nice, yeah. But there's a little section here. I'm just going to read this very quickly. I remember reading this in, I would estimate, 1980,

at the age of 12, and I think I've laughed about it on a weekly basis ever since. So if everyone will indulge me, I'm going to share this with you. Here we go. It's only a paragraph. Guests continued to pour in to Perrins, which is the name of the commune. Some had strange tales and quirks to relate. There was the hotelier who owned a chain of small hotels and restaurants which bore famous names, but with the first letter missing. He owned the Avoy, Orchester, and It's in London, Affle's in Singapore, Axin's in Paris, and the Elgonquin in New York.

The idea was that people would mistake them for their renowned equivalents. What actually happened... What actually happened was that some people said, look, the first letters dropped off the Dorchester, it must be going downhill, while the others said, oh, look, some silly Berk's trying to pretend that's the Ritz. The final straw to his collapsing empire

came when he stayed at the Avoy and found that its first letter had dropped off so that the neon sign outside the grubby frontage simply read, Voy Hotel. I mean, that's such a brilliant gag. He was great with names. I mean, my favourite school bully in all of literature is from Second and from Last and the Sacrifice.

He's called Tossa Pilkington Brick. And I love both the kind of funniness of it and the lack of imagination, that when the guy at the beginning of It Had To Be You checks into the hotel and has to give a false name, he thinks as quickly as he could and writes, Mr and Mrs Rivers, Lakeview, 69 Pond Street, Poole. With desperately serious consequences.

Yes, that's terrific. And in a very early novel, Ostrich Country, from 1968, he has an estate in a new town named after its most famous resident, Sir Bernard Colthart, the famous dermatologist, author of Pustules Can Be Fun and many similar works. It was in his honour that all the streets had been named after skin diseases. A spacious cul-de-sac where the larger houses were set in their leafy gardens

was known as The Shingles. But Paula's mother lived with her widowed sister in a more modest house, 32 in Patago Close. Genius. There is just something. There's a passage, this is him watching television the night he's discovered his wife has died. He switched the television on, flicked through the channels, saw a pathologist cutting out the left eye of a middle-aged man

and dropping it into a bottle. A panellist in a panic as he thought of the ridicule he was going to get from his workmates after he'd failed to name the capital of Hungary. A C-list fashion designer eating leeches in a mangrove swamp. An audience roaring as an overpaid chat show host held out a box of chocolates

to a pretty actress and said, can I give you one? A pathologist cutting up a pretty girl. A celebrity chef cutting up a bulb of fennel, blood pouring from the stomach of a woman in a crypt, an ugly 22-stone man with a horrendous paunch throwing a dart at a board, a lion eating a cheetah,

a pathologist cutting up a gay young man, a manly Rock Hudson trying to seduce a virgin on Doris Day, a pathologist cutting up a very obese man, a celebrity chef cutting up a loin of pork, and two sloths copulating, well, slothfully. I mean, it's satire, but he's just got that great... It makes it look very, very easy, which it isn't. I thought that Jonathan and I were both involved with an event

to commemorate David's life earlier in the year. Jonathan, could you just share the once-in-a-lifetime line-up of writers and artists who were gathered together? Yeah, it's a testament to how many different worlds he had a foot in, really. There was Patricia Hodge reading from David's books, who played in a couple of his TV series. There was Eleanor Braun, who knew him at Cambridge in The Footlights. in a couple of his TV series. There was Eleanor Braun, who knew him at Cambridge in the Footlights.

David Quantick, the writer of Veep, was there chairing the whole thing. There was me and Andy. Veep clinging onto the side of the stage by my fingernails, to be honest with you. Have I missed anyone else? Oh, Barry Cryer, of course. The great Barry Cryer, yeah. The great Barry Cryer, yeah. So we were tasked with talking about David and reading from his work.

And Jonathan and I performed a particular part of Reggie Perrin. And afterwards, Eleanor Bron, who was absolutely wonderful, came up to me and said, you read that marvellously, darling. I always like to hear how those who aren't in the business approach these things. I took that as a compliment we'll see i'm sure it was so this has been uh great today i hope this acts as an advert for david's work really that that he was a wonderful writer and a very very nice man and as my tweet suggested i was genuinely very shocked and saddened when he died earlier this year. And I wonder, Jonathan, could you just, it seems appropriate to read something from the end of It Had To Be You. Ridiculously titled, It Had To Be You. Yeah.

Yeah, this is from the very closing pages of the book when Deborah's funeral has taken place. All of the various plot strands have been resolved. And James is having a moment of reflection in his back garden. He's had a kind of moment of epiphany at the funeral where he's realized that he doesn't, his kind of half-hearted belief in God has slipped away. And instead, he's sitting in his garden contemplating the universe, and david writes he looked up into the not the heavens heavens no into the sky he was alone alone with only the whole solar system the vast galaxies the unimaginable distances the inconceivable immensity of it and here mankind was on one piddling little planet, and he was of no significance on this planet. He wasn't even important in so-called Great Britain. He was just a speck

in the vast, sprawling city of London. He didn't even stand out in Islington. He didn't stand out in his street in Islington, damn it. Until last Wednesday, he hadn't even been the best person living in his house. But he felt excited, challenged by his belief that his life was not serving God's purpose. He felt with a surge of optimism that without belief in a received purpose in life, he had the strength to make his own life purposeful. Well, thanks very much for listening, everyone. Thanks, Jonathan, for coming in and talking about David.

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