‘When I was considering how we could use your really wonderful material, it crossed my mind that it would make a marvellous musical - you can get away with a serious message in a musical that you can’t in a straight story.’ ‘A musical set in Central Africa?’ ‘For one thing, as a musical, it would solve the problem of the scenic background. Your scenic background is so good but it’s not for television.’ ‘You mean, formalized sets of African scenery?’ ‘Yes, that would be the idea. And a very simple story. Young English flier in training in Central Africa. The pretty Negro girl he meets at a party. He is lonely. She is kind to him. He meets her folks.’ ‘But he couldn’t conceivably meet a young Negro girl at a party in those parts. Unless it was in a political context - a tiny minority of people try to break down the colour bar. You didn’t have a political musical in mind?’ ‘Oh, but I didn’t realize … suppose he had an accident in the street and she helped him and took him to her home?’ ‘She couldn’t take him to her home without infringing about a dozen different laws. If she sneaked him in, then it would be very desperate and fearful, and not at all the right atmosphere for a musical.’ ‘You can be very very serious in a musical,’ she says, rebuking me, but as a matter of form. ‘We could use the local songs and dances. The music of Central Africa would be quite new to our viewers.’ ‘At the time this story is set in, the Africans were listening to jazz from America. They hadn’t started developing their own forms.’ Now her look at me says: You’re simply trying to be difficult. She abandons the musical and says: ‘Well, if we bought the property with an idea of doing the story straight, I feel the locale would have to be changed. My suggestion would be an army base in England. An American base. An American GI in love with an English girl.’ ‘A Negro GI?’ She hesitates. ‘Well, that would be difficult. Because after all, this is basically just a very simple love story. I am a very very great admirer of the British war film. You make such wonderful war films - such restraint. You have such - tact. That kind of feeling, we should aim for that. And the war atmosphere - the Battle of Britain atmosphere, then a simple love story, one of our boys and one of your girls.’ ‘But if you made him a Negro GI you could use all the indigenous folk music from your deep South?’ ‘Well, yes. But you see it wouldn’t be fresh for our viewers.’ ‘I can see it now,’ I say. ‘A chorus of American Negro GIs, in an English country village in wartime, with another chorus of fresh young English girls doing indigenous English country folk dances.’ I grin at her. She frowns. Then she grins. Then our eyes meet and she lets out a snort of laughter.