Whatever the Ride, Let TV be Your Guide

Beauty queen Barbara Parker wants more from life than a hometown crown.  She wants to be on TV, to make people laugh, to be the next Lucille Ball.  So she leaves the backwater of Blackpool for London to make it happen.

So begins Nick Hornby's Funny Girl.  You can see why I thought it'd be about Barbara and her thoughts and feelings.  But it's about something much bigger, namely pop culture and fame and how it all changed in the '60s. 

A true ensemble, Funny Girl follows Barbara's -- or, rather, the newly christened Sophie Straw's -- TV family though the ups and downs of showbiz and life.  Poignant, nostalgic, and sparkling with wit, it captures the excitement of being young and hungry -- and, in the end, the realization that the best part was those early days and their struggles.

Because from the start, they knew their show was special.  Hornby describes the magic through script writer Tony, reminding us why sitcoms have our hearts:

"It was the . . . promise of next week, another episode, another series (season); it couldn't help but offer hope, to its characters and to everyone who identified with them.  Tony didn't think he would ever want to write anything apart from half-hour comedies.  They contained the key to health, wealth, and happiness." (198)

Exactly.  Sitcoms make the world go 'round.

So let those reruns ring.

Book Report: I've Got Your Number by Sophie Kinsella

If I could live inside of a Sophie Kinsella novel, I would.  These books are as happy and glamorous and frothy as any chick lit tomes worth their glitter.  Plus, they've got heart.  Kinsella's latest, I've Got Your Number, is all about Poppy Wyatt, a heroine that rivals Rebecca Bloomwood in the kooky-sweet, Lucille Ball-esque but well-meaning hijinks department.  A fun-loving physical therapist (or, as they say on the other side of the pond, physiotherapist) engaged to a self-important, chauvinistic academic named Magnus, Poppy is catapulted into full crisis mode from page one, when we meet her scrabbling on a hotel floor in search of her heirloom emerald engagement ring.  Because this is the wacky world of Kinsella, this incident marks just the beginning of Poppy's misfortunes.  During the course of her hunt, her cell phone is stolen.  Thunderclouds loom until - miracle of miracles - a discarded phone beams up beacon-style from a garbage can.  Poppy picks it up, shakes off the spilled coffee, and embarks upon a modern fairy tale scripted largely by the plethora of text messages, voicemails, and emails to which she is now intriguingly and hilariously privy.

What begins as a purely selfish pursuit quickly mushrooms into a quest for corporate justice.  Much like the credit card-wielding character who came before her, Poppy becomes enmeshed in a kind of Working Girl caper minus the shoulder pads and blond ambition.  Which is to say that, like Melanie Griffith's Tess, Poppy is smarter than she looks, a girly girl deciphering deception after deception in the big bad world of business.  Yet Poppy's not trying to get ahead.  She just wants to get at the truth.  Of course, there's a good bit of romance too.  If the love triangle that forms between Poppy, Magnus, and what may be fiction's most appealing unknown caller is a little predictable, then it's every bit as satisfying as a more surprise-infused scenario.  Not that Number doesn't have its surprises.

And that's as good a stopping point as any.  If nothing else, you can't say I'm a spoiler.