Bennett at 90 has tickled all our funnybones
HAPPY birthday, Alan Bennett! It’s hard to believe but today the great man of letters is 90 years old. I like to think of the ten-yearold Alan with his school homework in the Leeds Reference Library, sitting alongside Barry Cryer, who was a year younger.
They remained good friends, right up to Barry’s death in 2022. Barry would regularly phone Alan with a joke like this: ‘A man takes liquid Viagra but swallows Tippex by mistake. There were no ill effects except the next morning he woke up with a massive correction.’
The Oldie magazine recently reprinted a memory of Barry’s: Alan Bennett once called on five friends to gather overheard remarks. ‘My absolute favourite was this. One of them was in a garden centre and he heard a man saying: “That sundial I bought last year has paid for itself already.”’
Alan’s plays are full of such quirky remarks, which have a playful sort of logic to them.
He developed his ear for them as a child. ‘I wouldn’t want to be as bald as that,’ he recalled his mother saying, after she spied a man with virtually no hair. ‘You’d never know where to stop washing your face.’
Bennett is possibly the single most influential writer of his generation. He inspired comics including Victoria Wood and Peter Kay to find the poetry in the commonplace.
‘Life’s not fair, is it?’ asked Victoria, in one of her monologues. ‘Some of us drink champagne in the fast lane and some of us eat our sandwiches by the loose chippings on the A597.’
It might as easily have come from a character in a play by Alan Bennett.
The generation of Northern working-class writers before him were Angry Young Men. Bennett shares none of their shoutiness. He finds life too colourful.
Visiting a shoe shop in Sunderland he notes down the labels: Alabaster Softee Leather, Clover Trilobel Fur Bound Bootees, Mahogany Lear Peep Toe.
He scatters his notebooks with wonderfully precise observations of the ever- changing peculiarities of human behaviour: ‘Note that after a successful round even showjumpers now punch the air.’
‘ 14 March. Two nuns in Marks and Spencer’s studying meringues.’ ‘Liam Gallagher, the younger of the Oasis brothers, has the kind of eyes in which the pupils are half-hidden under the eyelids; as if the eyes had stopped between floors.’
He never confuses serious with stuffy, approaching art and literature as if they were close friends rather than forbidding great aunts. Selecting paintings from the National Gallery to be reproduced and hung in schools, he opted for a 16th century work of the Holy Family by Gossaert. He then started to wonder about the role of Joseph. ‘ . . . one feels that he’s rightly a saint, if only because, having to play second fiddle, he needs to be. It’s a situation one sometimes comes across in showbusiness, the famous actress with the supporting spouse.’
He also chose a 1937 painting by Stanley Spencer of the beach at Southwold, on the Suffolk coast, with towels on a line blowing in the wind. ‘ I know this kind of towel from childhood, thin, ribbed . . . only just big enough to do the job. It’s the kind of towel, brisk, bracing and comfortless, that would have commended itself to Baden-Powell.’
He then remembered on his first visit to America in 1962 sending huge bath towels from Bloomingdale’s back to his beloved parents in Leeds. They left them in their cellophane wrappers, too good to use.
AS A child on his way to the municipal baths, ‘one carried the towel under one’s arm in a kind of Swiss roll with one’s cossy in the centre. Children don’t do that now. Why? What happened and when?’
I realise that I haven’t touched on his life’s work: his wonderfully funny stage plays, his often melancholy TV films, his Talking Heads monologues, his studies of poets such as Larkin and Hardy, the documentaries in which he observes human beings with the same mix of curiosity and wonderment that David Attenborough observes the animal kingdom.
How lucky we are to have them as our guides!
A SCHOOLBOY told police that ‘anyone in my position’ would have gone to his ‘good-looking’ teacher’s apartment and had sex with her, a court heard yesterday.
Rebecca Joynes’ looks were the talk of pupils in her class, the boy said in an interview played to jurors at the 30-year-old maths teacher’s trial for sex offences.
She allegedly went on to have sex with a second pupil while on bail awaiting trial in relation to the first teenager, and had the second pupil’s baby.
Joynes arranged to meet the first boy, aged 15, after giving him the first ten digits of her phone number during a Monday morning maths lesson, Manchester Crown Court heard. The pupil, referred to as Boy A, said he tried calling each possible permutation for the final digit before finally hearing it ring on her desk.
Over the course of the week, they began swapping messages over Snapchat, he told detectives, eventually arranging to meet up
‘I hope you don’t get pregnant’
and go to her Salford Quays apartment after school on the Friday.
Joynes accepts picking Boy A up in her Audi, buying him a £345 Gucci belt from Selfridges, and then taking him to her apartment where he stayed the night in October 2021, the trial has heard. But she denies sexual activity took place.
The teenager said Joynes was ‘obviously good-looking’. Asked why he thought Joynes had given him all but one digit of her phone number, Boy A replied: ‘It sounds as if she probably wanted me to message her.’
Asked what he thought would happen after she picked him up, Boy A replied that he ‘wasn’t expecting’ they would end up having sex. But he added: ‘I feel like anyone in my position when we arranged to meet would – if you’re my age and in my year.’
Boy A said that during the car journey, he mentioned he wasn’t ‘old enough’ to drive, to which she laughingly replied, ‘Oh, shut up!’
He added that when they got to Selfridges, Joynes said: ‘Hopefully, we don’t see anyone.’
She then drove him to her onebed apartment, he said, where they allegedly had sex twice. Boy A said they did not discuss protection or contraception, but afterwards he told Joynes: ‘I hope to God you don’t get pregnant.’
The boy told police that the morning after they allegedly had sex, Joynes warned him his mother had ‘better not find out that it was me’.
The court has heard Joynes was arrested the following Monday after Boy A told friends. According to the prosecution, while she was awaiting trial, she was ‘quite brazenly’ in a relationship with a second pupil, Boy B. Joynes admits having a sexual relationship with Boy B but insists it began only after he turned 16.
She denies six counts of sexual activity with a child, two of them while in a position of trust.
The trial continues.