Confessio gloriously of a grumpy old man
Alan Bennett’s a reluctant national treasure. But as his delightfully droll diaries show, he’s an incorrigible old Leftie who believes life was better in the past
MY TROUSERS were around my ankles and I was lying on the examination couch when the consultant moved on from intimate questions about my kidneys, bladder et al and asked by way of social chit-chat: ‘Writing anything interesting at the moment?’
He prodded and poked as I answered as breezily as I could in such exposed circumstances: ‘Well, I’m doing this piece about Alan Bennett. You know, the playwright. He’s 82 and he’s just published the latest batch of his diaries, his memoirs.’
‘Seems to me,’ shouted the doc, not looking up and speaking at the top of his voice because his stethoscope was in his ears, ‘that man Bennett’s been writing his memoirs all his life! Deep breath for me, please.’
Instead of inhaling, I burst out laughing. Here was a situation worthy of the self-mocking, but insightful Bennett himself — an absurd moment when out of a humdrum and even a humiliating human encounter comes an immortal line that hits the mark spot on. The doctor’s diagnosis was right. In his works, Bennett has, indeed, been writing his personal history since he first put pen to paper, revelling in the past, finding sanctuary in nostalgia and drawing in receptive readers among the millions who, like him, believe we’ve all gone to hell in a handcart since the good old days.
He is apoplectic about a child replacing the familiar adult voice on the Speaking Clock. ‘God rot the fools who thought it was a good idea.’
When Leeds (he was born in nearby Armley) names an ‘environmentally sensitive’ bus after him, he typically notes: ‘I just wish it could have been a tram.’
If this makes him a bit of a whinger, then so be it. It’s not necessarily his fault. ‘One does try not to be an Old Git,’ he sighs wearily, ‘but they don’t make it easy.’
Alan Bennett is everywhere this Christmas. His bespectacled face shines out from bookshop windows on the cover of his new work, a present to be prized by his hordes of appreciative acolytes. And a thumping great gift it is, too, at a massive 736 pages, in need of its own Santa sack.
It’s entitled Keeping On Keeping On, which encapsulates not just its length, but his dogged approach to life and getting old.
It’s half diaries of the past ten years (2005 to 2015), half an assortment of pieces of writing about plays and the people he’s been involved with.
There are televised highlights from it in a 60minute profile of the dear old thing himself on BBC2 tonight, entitled Alan Bennett’s Diaries, followed by a showing of The Lady In The Van, last year’s film starring Maggie Smith as the cranky old homeless woman Bennett allowed to live in a clappedout vehicle parked in the driveway of his North London house for 15 years.
I say ‘dear old thing’ because that’s what he is. With his owlish looks, flat Yorkshire vowels and a sense of humour that’s generally more winsome than waspish, he’s become over the years a bit of a national treasure — like a more educated and learned version of Wilfred Pickles of Have A Go fame in the Fifties.
This is odd only because he first made his name as a social satirist pricking the establishment where it hurt in the Sixties revue Beyond The Fringe in the stellar company of fellow students Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.
They drew on their youth and Oxbridge cleverness to lampoon war veterans (‘legless’ fighter pilot Douglas Bader was a particular target), politicians, clergymen, any and everyone in authority.
They were the progenitors of That Was The Week That Was, Monty Python and, indeed, every one of today’s in-your-face stand-up comics who believe themselves so cutting-edge and original.
At 82, there’s still the air of the undergraduate about Bennett, sporting the same uniform of jacket and jumper he wore at Oxford 60 years ago, where — after two years of National Service in the Army as a Russian interpreter — he arrived feeling shy and out of place. And a tie, always a tie. His mother, whose quaint aphorisms he recalls with great fondness, made him keep his shirt buttoned at the top and his neck covered to ward off TB, and he’s never lost the habit.
Other old habits also die hard. His office in a smart-bohemian enclave of North London is a mess of books and papers, without a single technological innovation apart from a battered typewriter (£5 from the Age Concern shop).
Not a screen, mouse or mobile to be seen. He writes in neat longhand on plain paper — a lost art in itself — and his words are transcribed by an assistant who’s been interpreting his scribbles for years. The output from this Venerable Bede-like cell is prodigious.
It’s not just the groundbreaking plays, films and TV dramas (Forty Years On, Talking Heads, The Madness Of George III, An Englishman Abroad, The History Boys), but scripts, sermons, essays, books of his own, introductions to other authors’ books, countless contributions to his precious highbrow London Review Of Books, plus all those ideas he never got round to completing.
Then there are the jottings for his diary, some scrawled on the back of uncashed cheques, his musings and observations about life, people and events.
Bennett is no Pepys, dashing hither and thither for work and play, busy, busy, busy.
Not a lot happens in Bennett’s daily life, as he constantly reminds himself and his readers. Days go by without anything worth recording, he insists a little plaintively, as if he’s a backwater. It’s not strictly true. Outside his window, a pompous Jonathan Miller (literati neighbour and old friend, known to Bennett as the Doctor) berates an elderly drunk urinating in the street.
‘It’s all right,’ the old fellow explains to calm the situation. ‘I’m Irish.’
Then he proceeds to shake hands with Miller, using, as Bennett notes with glee, ‘the same hand in which he had just been holding his d***’.
On another day, the comedian Tracey Ullman pops by from Hollywood, dressed as an angel. She’s been filming just around the corner and wants to show him her costume. He observes that, such is her stardom, she is driven to and from his house in a Daimler, even though the set is 200 yards away.
He greets another visitor by recalling that they last met at Buckingham Palace — while at a Downing Street reception, a cheery Gordon Brown pumps his hand and tells him he’s an ‘institution’.
But it’s the little everyday things he recalls that provide the wry humour that is so engaging and typically Bennett.
Of a ‘routine colonoscopy’ — the sort of intimate medical examination that comes with advancing years — he notes wittily that ‘it is never routine, with no telling what’s round the corner’. The sensation reminds him of being on the Big Dipper at Morecambe, aged six, in the first year of the war.
Refreshingly he is selfdeprecating, a man with so many successes up his sleeves yet happy to acknowledge his career mistakes over the years, too — such as turning down invitations to adapt Brideshead Revisited and War Horse (‘I didn’t think there was much I could do, so goodbye huge royalties and the Spielberg film.’)
He seems half to agree with the Oxford don who dismissed the young, graduating Bennett six decades ago as ‘amiable, funny, but not a first-class mind’.
He quotes the verdict and it obviously still nags away at him because he admits that even now he finds giving interviews a bit worrying for fear ‘I would at last be found out’.
But there’s no doubt there’s a sharp and perceptive brain at work beneath the Bennett mop of hair. For example, he gets to the essence of terrorism when discussing the 2005 London bombings. As he watches CCTV of the bombers
Though he’s 82, Bennett has the air of a Fifties student
chatting and joking before they split up to commit their acts of violence what strikes him is their ‘gaiety’.
He likens them to Henry VIII’s betrayed Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, ‘joking on the scaffold, except that More wasn’t taking anyone else with him’.
‘How can mere self-preservation prevail against such unconcern? This debonair going to their (and our) deaths [is] beyond understanding and made so, too, because it would, in any other circumstances, be admirable.’
He is contemptuous of prime minister Tony Blair’s knee-jerk response to the bombings: ‘Let’s pretend it’s the Blitz and bags me be Churchill.’
Bennett distrusts Blair — particularly his ‘sloppy’ use of superfluous adverbs such as ‘I honestly believe’ and ‘I really think’. They ‘diminish rather than augment his credibility’, says Bennett. His real venom, though, is directed at Margaret Thatcher — despite the fact (or perhaps because) his roots and hers are very similar.
Both were children of shopkeepers (Bennett’s dad was a butcher and hers a grocer) and both were propelled up the ladder by a grammar school education and admission to Oxford.
He calls her ‘a mirthless bully’ and blames her for the hardness and lack of social conscience he feels have overtaken this country.
On her death, he rants bitterly ‘she should have been buried, as once upon a time monarchs used to be, in the depths of the night’ rather than given a ceremonial funeral.
Tories are ‘tribal and ruthless, tricky and dishonest’, ‘self-interested and self-seeking’. Bennett hates privatisation (in principle), public schools (‘not fair’) and the police (for harassing black people). Other triggers of rage are this newspaper (‘If the Mail chose to target Heinrich Himmler [head of Hitler’s Gestapo], I would tend to be on his side’), Richard Branson, David Beckham’s tattoos, Classic FM and estate agents.
(With a double-swipe, he snootily dismisses Tory minister Jeremy Hunt as having ‘the look of an estate agent waiting to show someone a property’.)
But he loves time spent in old churches and travels miles for a beautiful carved pew-end, pedimented rood screen or medieval brass lectern.
Antique shops are a passion, too — shared with his partner, Rupert Thomas, editor of World Of Interiors magazine.
For decades, Bennett’s homosexuality was the love that dared not speak its name. His private life was a blank sheet as far as the rest of the world was concerned and he offered no enlightenment. Later, he explained his silence was because he did not want to be pigeonholed as a gay playwright.
But he’s been quietly with Rupert for close to a quarter of a century. Their relationship was sealed in 2006 with a civil partnership ceremony in front of a handful of witnesses and then celebrated over coffee in Great Portland Street.
While in New York without Rupert for the premiere of The History Boys, he writes: ‘So miss R at every stage of the journey, setting off, getting there, half the person I am.’ But present contentment doesn’t stop him constantly turning wistfully to the past, as he admits he has always done.
‘I was saying farewell to the world virtually in my teens,’ he says.
‘My first play [when I was 34] was a lament for an England that has gone. My last play [aged 79] was still waving the same handkerchief.’
He finds the continuity comforting. ‘Better than always hailing a new dawn.’
Nostalgia is what he does best, and it is captivating. One afternoon in Berkshire, ‘we stroll through the high barley with swallows skimming low over the tops and it feels like a scene from the Forties.’
For no good reason, he recalls his father making herb beer, which used to explode. ‘We’d be crouched round the wireless listening to ITMA [the comedy It’s That Man Again] when there would be a dull thud from the scullery as yet another bottle went up.’
The ‘small decaff latte’ with which he starts his day in London reminds him that he’s had milky coffee like this all his life — first boiled up in a pan by his mam when he was a lad.
In The History Boys, he laments the passing of an education system — the sort he had — where pupils are encouraged by civilised and civilising teachers to imagine and explore and think rather than just pass exams.But he then gets further up onto his political high horse, expressing romantic Leftleaning views straight out of luvvie-dom. ‘I fear that there will be a Tory government for the remainder of my life, and with it England dismembered,’ he writes.
But he makes no mention of a Labour Party so hopelessly out on a limb it can’t mount a credible and votewinning opposition.
He describes his own political views as a ‘blend of backward-looking radicalism and conservative socialism’.
It’s the Labour Party of Clement Attlee he really yearns for, establishing the NHS, promoting advancement through education, providing a safety net, improving society at a time when people were on their knees.
But he seems utterly blinkered about what went wrong with that noble dream — grasping unions, a culture of entitlement, out-of-control and wasteful state bureaucracy, falling standards in comprehensive schools, a health service with unaffordable expectations.
He pays homage to ‘the state’ because the state was what made him — through grammar schools, university maintenance grants, public libraries and the like.
But many of us who benefited in the same way have watched that ‘state’ turn into an over-mighty encumbrance and a hindrance rather than a help.
Equally, Bennett seems to choke on the word ‘profit’, while it’s people’s aspirations that have done most to promote economic success and raise living standards.
Doesn’t he realise it wasn’t the state that provided a home for Miss Shepherd, his Lady In The Van? She didn’t find help from social service, but from private enterprise in the form of Bennett’s own kind nature.
The great irony is that it’s such human kindness that, in the end, trumps the curmudgeonly side of him and makes him the much-loved figure he continues to be.
Typically, though, being regarded so benignly annoys him. ‘If I were to stab Judi Dench with a pitchfork, I should still be regarded as a cuddly teddy bear.’ He wants to be perceived in a more rugged light.
When a newspaper once hailed Harold Pinter as the only eminent writer who was ‘radical and untainted by the Establishment’, Bennett was piqued that he’d been forgotten — seemingly unaware that his gilded literary lifestyle made him a fully paid-up member of the metropolitan luvvie Establishment.
So treasure he will have to be, whether he likes it or not.
KEEPING On Keeping On by Alan Bennett (Faber and Profile Books, £25).
He hates public schools, the police and privatisation