Sunlit days and starry nights

In 1990, the BBC’s adaptation of David Lodge’s culture-clash novel Nice Work won an award at a glitzy soirée in London. At the same time, his debut stage play The Writing Game opened at the Birmingham Rep. Malcolm Bradbury, his old friend and partner on the twin tracks of literary academia and serio-comic fiction, had come to Birmingham to stay and see the show. After a starry night in the West End, and ‘a brief whirl around the dance floor’, Lodge sped back home. He arrived at 3.30 a.m., but found that his wife Mary ‘had accidentally locked me out, and I had to throw gravel up at our bedroom window from the back garden to wake her without disturbing the Bradburys’. Mr Pooter may have joined the A-list, but mishaps and pratfalls still dog his every step.