A short history of loneliness
THE HISTORY BOYS
BBC4, 9pm
THE recent run of repeats of some of Alan Bennett’s work for television was a reminder of why he is so suited to television: he writes about loneliness and television is about loneliness too. It’s about one person switching their television on because that means there are voices and faces in the room with them. Television is a kind of someone else.
The History Boys, the unsettling film of the original stage play, is about the same subject. A teacher called Hector (played by the late Richard Griffiths) is lonely even though he’s surrounded by thousands of pupils.
Griffiths is marvellous in the role – pushing and pulling his pupils but never really pushing himself – but it’s the atmosphere of wasted opportunity that is most moving. As Bennett said in his recent interview with the film’s director Nicholas Hytner, shown as part of Bennett’s 80th birthday celebrations: “The things you remember are the things you didn’t do.”
The same subject – unrealised potential – is also explored through the pupils and while some of the plot is unlikely to say the least, the young cast make it real. Dominic Cooper is particularly good as a boy who has the kind of strident self-confidence you can only have when you are 16 years old (before reality sets in).
There is also plenty of Bennett’s signature style in the script: jokes that hurt and lots of the watchable melancholia he does by putting laughing and crying right up against each other.
There was more of that on show in the recent repeat of the Talking Head with Patricia Routledge as a woman obsessed with writing letters of complaint. One of her complaints was about staff smoking outside a crematorium. “Of course if I’d happened to be heartbroken, it would have been much worse,” she says. “But I hardly knew the woman.”
And the good news is that there’s more to come with a film version of Bennett’s play The Lady in the Van, starring Maggie Smith.