Short Cuts Anne Robinson
Never meet your heroes – unless they’re warm, charming and tall
Alan Bennett has grown since I last saw him in the flesh.
Admittedly that was nearly sixty years ago, when I was a teenager and my brother, then at Cambridge, managed to get tickets for Beyond the Fringe after it transferred from the Edinburgh Festival to the Duke of York’s in London.
I can still remember Alan in the corner of the stage wearing a dog collar, beginning his sermon, ‘My brother Esau is a hairy man and I am a smooth man.’
Perhaps the reason he looks so tall, as he appears at the door of the tent at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, is that all those years ago he was often standing between Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller, who were six-foot-plus giants.
Anyway, I don’t have a chance to comment on his possible late-onset growth, as he immediately says, ‘We have something in common.’ I imagine he is going to mention our love of the late Russell Harty or that I, like him, come from the North.
Instead, he taps his ear. ‘We both go to Pindrop for our hearing aids.’
Sharing a gig with Alan Bennett isn’t ideal. Especially as he is on first. Think Ella Fitzgerald followed by Lulu. But it’s a good cause, the inaugural year of the David Vaisey Prize, awarding £5,000 to an outstanding Gloucestershire library; a prize the organisers hope will soon spread to include all libraries in the UK.
David Vaisey is the former head of the Bodleian, which houses the Bennett archives. I’m chair of the judges.
There is a pretty sound rule about never meeting your heroes. Bennett is the exception and entirely as you’d hope. Warm, charming and patient with the fans who want selfies.
He’s sportingly standing in for the Duchess of Cornwall, or Camilla Cornwall, as she is oddly referred to in the Cotswolds.
In his speech, he points out that neither he, the son of a butcher, or David Vaisey, the son of a gardener, would have made it to Oxbridge, had they not been on a full grant.
On the matter of books, he supplies a typical Bennettism. ‘Reading,’ he says, ‘is a risky business.’
Until earlier this year, I hadn’t, since childhood, visited a county library and am astonished to find they are now light, airy spaces, full of chatter and bonhomie. Even better, the female staff no longer behave like scary, middle-aged spinsters out of an early Kingsley Amis novel.
Instead, we have libraries and their frankly heroic workforce shouldering much of the care in the community for the elderly, young mothers, the unemployed and the lonely.
Indeed, at one library I visited during the judging tour, a district nurse was using the space to carry out her health checks on babies.
A word of warning about the Christmas holidays.
Have your grown-up children discovered an unexpected income stream from offering accommodation on Airbnb? Finding to their delight that, while they are away, they can rent their flat or home to grateful tourists.
Let me advise you of the next stage. So delighted are these grown-up children (who likely have children of their own) that it occurs to them there is no reason to only earn extra money during their bucket-and-spade holiday.
I am coming across countless grandparents who find their homes invaded at a moment’s notice, as these same grown-up children move back in, ‘because we’ve let out our house for another two weeks.’
I’m at the Duke of York’s Theatre again to see Ink, the glorious production written by the young James Graham about Rupert Murdoch buying and transforming the Sun newspaper.
Graham’s love of contemporary history and his research are extraordinary. I can’t fault a detail.
I’m there with three clever, young television executives, for whom the story is a revelation, while this old fart is telling them that she interviewed Rupert on the day he bought the lossmaking, left-leaning broadsheet from the Mirror stable.
But since when did theatregoers bring with them what looks like the entire contents of their home, housed in large, black rucksacks, which you fall over because you do not spot one in time? Or even if you do spot one, the journey to your seat is similar to an assault course.
My young friends suggest it’s because people these days hot-desk, or have no permanent place of work. And might well be cyclists.
Shame – as there are so many old Fleet Street faces in the audience, I rather hoped it was as it used to be, when a male colleague turned up to work with all his worldly goods. Yet again, an angry wife had thrown him out.