Alan Bennett celebrated his 75th birthday recently and the BBC decided to celebrate this with Alan Bennett week. I feel they may have overdone it a bit, he popped up on BBC1, BBC2 and BBC4 and was trailed extensively to the point where I began to wonder whether I needed to watch any of the interviews as I had seen so many excerpts. I think even Mr B himself felt a tad uncomfortable as he was reported in the papers today as saying that he hadn't realised how often he repeated himself and it was a bit embarrassing to see he had told the same anecdotes over and over again - there was one such illustration of this when I saw the same little story he told about his mother on three separate channels, at three separate times and talking to three separate people. It is always all or nothing with the BBC and, as it is usually nothing, I am not going to complain too much about Alan Bennett coming at me from all directions as I love him and think he is so clever and subtle and has a hawk eye for human idiocies and idiosyncrasies.
I first became aware of Alan Bennett in the 1980s, though I had seen him in grainy black and white television pictures with Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook in programes about the Cambridge Fringe some twenty years earlier (at the time I remember thinking this was a cool hairstyle...), but it was his superb series Talking Heads, a series of six plays with one actor/actress in one long monologue to the camera. that really caught my attention. I gather the BBC weren't keen on this idea and did not think it would work (I always admire the BBC's complete inability to recognise a good programme when they see it - Only Fools and Horses and Strictly Come Dancing being two of their most popular and loved programmes which scared the Men in Grey Suits silly and were initially rejected), but some bright spark insisted and so they were made and appeared to huge acclaim and BAFTAS showered on all sides. Out of the first series I remember Alan Bennett himself playing the part of Colin, a slightly odd man living with his mum who panics when she takes up with a 'fancy man'. That expression is so North of England, it is wonderful. One line in this particular play which was regularly trotted out after a harangue from his mum was 'I didn't say anything'. This line has been used by our family ever since.
Wonderful though they all were and one in particular starring Thora Hird called a Cream Cracker under the sofa quite marvellous, my favourite was called A Bed Among the Lentils starring Maggie Smith as Susan, an unhappy, alcoholic vicar's wife. Mercilessly honing in on the 'Fan Club' and her husband Geoffrey 'I helped put the books away while he did his underneath this cassock I am a man like anybody else act' we are left in no doubt of her unhappiness and cynicism. Forced to travel further afield for her drink she meets Mr Ramesh who runs a mini market in Leeds and as the weeks go by embarks on an affair with him. It is all quite gentle and sweet and it is he in the end who persuades her to go to AA:
"...one night he turned his troubled face towards me with its struggling moustache and asked if he might take the bull by the horns and enquire if intoxication was a requirement for sexual intercourse, or was it perhaps his colour? Because if not he would like to float the suggestion that sober might be even nicer"
Geoffrey claims that is is he who talked her into going and she does not disillusion him. She becomes a feather in his cap, he says it has brought us closer together. He even talks about her at a conference on the Supportive Parish and Susan notices that 'I've seen the young unpwardly mobile parsons sneaking looks at me now and then and thinking why wasn't I smart enough to marry an alcoholic?"
There is a moment at the end when Susan goes to visit Mr Ramesh and finds he has gone and Maggie Smith looks at the camera and says with a break in her voice "Mr Ramesh sold his shop. He's gone back to India to fetch his wife. She's old enough now apparently". In a preview to this showing Alan Bennett said he had not directed Maggie Smith to do this at all, she just did it and he said it was so incredibly moving it made him cry. Well, it did me too. I have loved this actress for years and still do and it was lovely to see her again.
We were also treated to the superb play An Englishman Abroad all about Guy Burgess and starring one of my all time favourite actors, the sadly no longer with us, Alan Bates and A Question of Attribution in which James Fox plays the third man, the traitor in charge of the Queen's pictures, played by James Fox (whose characterisation must surely have been based on that of the art critic Brian Sewell with his cut glass accent), and Prunella Scales as the Queen in a sublime performance.
Back in 2007 I read the Uncommon Reader by Alan B, hardly a novel, more a novella which I reviewed here, about the fantasy that our Queen, not renowned for being an intellectual by any means, discovered reading and the joy of it which totally took over her life. It is a perfect read, not too short, not too long and the final page when you discover that Her Maj is going to abdicate and chuck it all in so she can continue reading is pure bliss. If you have not already read it, do try it.
It is clear from his various interviews that Alan Bennett is slightly bemused by his status as National Treasure and cannot quite understand it. I think we like our National T's to be sweet, delightful and cosy and Alan B certainly presents an outward appearance which fits the criteria - slightly awkward speech, hesitant, wears glasses and appears modest and shy. Of course he is totally the opposite and when I think about this I recall a previous National Treasure, Sir John Betjeman, the poet and preserver of old churches and buildings (thanks to him we still have St Pancras Station) who developed an eccentric and endearing persona which was helped enormously by his love of teddy bears. He was of course, as is Alan Bennett, as sharp as a tack and reading his diaries and letters reveals an acute, keen mind with a scurrilous turn of phrase.
In a recent interview in the Times, Dame Judi Dench got rather cross that she is now being called such and totally disagrees with this nomenclature and that she certainly has done nothing to warrant this title. I fear though she will just have to get used to being another National Treasure. Once we have made up our minds there is no way back.....
