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-year-old 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: vinix 지속시간 ‘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.
Alan Bennett, pictured, turns 90-years-old today
Alan Bennett pictured at the London Evening Standard British Film Awards at Television Centre in 2016
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.
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‘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 show-jumpers 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.
Alan Bennett, pictured right, aged 28, with the Beyond The Fringe team in 1962
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!
Barry Cryer