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Chapters (21)
  1. Cover
  2. Landing Page
  3. A Private Function
  4. CONTENTS
  5. INTRODUCTION
  6. The Old Crowd
  7. CAST
  8. A Private Function
  9. PREFACE
  10. CAST AND CREDITS
  11. Prick Up Your Ears
  12. PREFACE
  13. CAST AND CREDITS
  14. 102 Boulevard Haussmann
  15. CAST AND CREDITS
  16. The Madness of King George
  17. PREFACE
  18. CAST AND CREDITS
  19. About the Author
  20. Also by the Author
  21. Copyright

DR SWABY   My Lord Mayor, My Lady Mayoress, ladies and gentlemen, it is my great pleasure to propose to you now the toast of ‘The Happy Couple’.
Everybody rises except Mother, who is still eating, and only a nudge from Joyce fetches her to her feet. As they raise their glasses, a Brussels sprout rolls out unnoticed from Gilbert’s serviette.

ALL   The Happy Couple.

INT. HOTEL FUNCTION ROOM. NIGHT.

At the after-dinner dance, Dr Swaby and Joyce make a handsome couple in the foxtrot. We notice that Dr Swaby’s hand wanders.

INT./EXT. OLD RAILWAY WAGON. DAY.

In another secret ‘sty’, a chubby pink piglet is being lovingly fed titbits by Gilbert and Allardyce. Gilbert picks the piglet up, cradling it. End credits over this.

Prick Up Your Ears

This is the unspoken contract of a wife and her works. In the long run wives are to be paid in a peculiar coin – consideration for their feelings. And it usually turns out this is an enormous, unthinkable inflation few men will remit, or if they will, only with a sense of being overcharged.

Elizabeth Hardwick,
Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature

PREFACE

The original idea for a film based on the life of Joe Orton came from John Lahr. When in 1978 he was about to publish Prick Up Your Ears, his biography of Orton, Lahr offered Stephen Frears and myself an option on the film rights. He anticipated that when the book was published there would be other film offers and, having had an unhappy experience over an earlier book, Lahr wanted to make sure Orton’s story would be properly handled. Whether these other offers materialised I don’t know, but his caution was probably justified. One Hollywood producer who saw an early draft of the script said that he saw no problems so long as Orton was made into an American; oh, and he should of course be heterosexual.