"That's very good! That's very funny!" It takes a special kind of chutzpah, a real head for heights, to make one of the characters in your film a writer, and then make him lavish writerly praise on the dialogue you've written for him to overhear.
But such a writer, and now such a film-maker is Ben Elton, that prodigiously industrious man whose fate it has been to be patronised by pundits with a fraction of his abilities, and despite having written one of the most brilliant west end stage comedies of the 90s in the form of Gasping, and a gripping Hollywood novel in Popcorn, destined to have each new product discussed only in relation to a dimly-remembered past as the spangly-jacketed scourge of Thatch.
His debut film, Maybe Baby, follows so closely on the heels of his novel, Inconceivable, that it isn't an adaptation so much as the second prong of a multi-media pincer-movement on the cinemagoing public.
The speaker is Hugh Laurie, playing Sam, a lovely, gentle chap who is trying for a baby with his delectable wife Lucy (Joely Richardson). On their combined salaries as BBC producer and agent, they are evidently able to afford a sumptuous riverside apartment, whose spectacular views are glimpsed by day and - with twinkling lights - by night. Together, they endure the indignities of IVF with regulation self-deprecatory humour and unhappily undiminished physical ardour. There is a prime example of what Ben Elton, in his genteel way, calls a "knob gag": "I've seen harder knobs on the door of a bouncy castle!"
But Lucy is on the verge of an affair with a dishy actor, and Sam commits an adultery of the mind. Against her wishes, he is plagiarising their life and Lucy's observations for a film he is secretly writing - about a lovely, gentle chap and his delectable wife trying for a baby. (His chortling line about something being very good and very funny is in tribute to an artless remark of Lucy's about wishing she'd had her bikini line done, wanting to look her best for the gynaecologist.)
In the novel, Lucy and Sam tell the story alternately from their diaries, a neat, epistolary device which gives unmediated access to the principals' minds and also fabricates an effect of authenticity in representing that trickiest of things for the male writer: the woman's point of view. Elton keeps the diaries for the film but it is a small, but distinct triumph for his directorial debut that he is able to keep it together without translating them into smirking voiceovers.
There are many things to drive you mad with irritation in this film. The legion of Britcom superstars in gaggy, sitcommy walk-on roles is often just appalling. When Dawn French bustles on as the comedy Australian nurse who packs Hugh off to a cubicle for a discreet "five-knuckle shuffle", all you can do is shut your eyes, put your fingers in your ears and wait for this unteachably smug and unfunny cameo to be over. And, frankly, hanging, flogging and electronic tagging are too good for Emma Thompson as Desiree, the New Agey hippy woman who tells them to have it off on a ley-line. As the consultant, Rowan Atkinson at least has a funny line about his moped.
The film's most insultingly unfunny and unconvincing character is a shouting BBC executive who bullies our Hugh about the need to get into film production. Like many of the supporting cast, he has a mute retinue of hangers-on, pouting, glowering, slouching and taking unfunniness and unconvincingness to a new level. He, and they, are from sitcom land and don't stand up to big-screen scrutiny. Tellingly, Richard Curtis keeps this kind of very broad characterisation under control in his movies. Furthermore, the executive, often seen against huge and not-quite-up-to-the-minute slogans reading "Stay On Message", snaps: "British movies have never been hipper!" - a line clearly conceived when they actually were hip, and when making fun of their hipness was an affordable luxury.
Yet set against all this are perfectly decent, watchable performances from Hugh Laurie and Joely Richardson, who are endowed with a sweetly comic existence by Elton, never ranging too far into ickiness, and directed with clarity and assurance. Laurie was the redemptive presence in the sick-making Peter's Friends, then playing a grieving father with dignity, intelligence and restraint. He brings all these qualities into Maybe Baby, together with an insouciant lightness, and Joely Richardson induces the souffle of light comedy to rise perfectly satisfactorily.
The younger, and more radical Ben Elton might have realised the ironies embedded in a well-off couple from the prosperous west straining for an IVF baby, while the developing countries struggle with overpopulation and poverty. But he gives no hint of that here, which is perhaps a blessing, considering his propensity for right-on solemnity. When most of British film-making is so brain-dead and scandalously bad, Ben Elton and BBC Films have made a respectable film, which promises to get plenty of laughs - and its investment back at the box office.
