Tart and tea – Alan Bennett at 80
Hannah Khalil
Digital Content Producer, About The BBC Blog
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“Alan Bennett’s 80 this week – are you going to write a blog?” It was a something I hadn’t considered – because this is a BBC blog, and Alan Bennett is a theatre dramatist. Right? Wrong.
Most people will have heard of Alan Bennett, even if they’re not familiar with his work. The writer, whose contribution to arts in the UK has been huge, turns 80 this month. It would be easy to presume – as I had – that Bennett is mainly a playwright – for the last 20 years he has dominated stages across the UK with plays like The Lady in the Van, The History Boys, The Madness of King George and The Habit of Art.
Closer inspection reveals that Bennett’s first writing home was the small screen, and the BBC where much of his output appeared in the form of TV dramas, as the forthcoming retrospective of his work attests. He confesses, “Television plays come more easily” – and bemoans the fact he only manages to produce stage works at four or five year intervals in this interview with Mark Lawson for Radio 4’s Front Row.
We won’t call Bennett a national treasure – he probably wouldn’t like it – but he’s certainly a BBC favourite. Aficionados of his (very funny, well observed) dramas won’t be surprised that Bennett’s first work was as a comedy writer. He penned Beyond the Fringe written with Dudley Moore (a fellow Oxford student) as well as Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller. He went on to write solo, On the Margin, a six-part satirical sketch show for the BBC, which starred Bennett himself (yes, an actor too), along with Prunella Scales. The 1966 series was thought lost but was recovered earlier this year, and is due to be returned to the BBC Archive.
Alan Bennett and John Sergeant perform a sketch in On The Margin in 1966
Two years later, in 1968, Forty Years On Bennett’s first stage play, a highly theatrical piece about a school play being mounted, opened. Again Bennett performed, this time alongside John Gielgud.
I think it’s fascinating that almost 40 years on from Forty Years On (!) Bennett revisited the institutional setting for arguably his most popular play The History Boys. It made me think about what is so appealing to Bennett (and other dramatists) about the school as a setting for drama. Something in the hierarchy of a school – within the teachers and pupils themselves – allows for interesting resonance and metaphor and offers the opportunity for comparison with political and state hierarchy. It’s also a good place to find a good schoolboy joke, and the hilarious one-liners Bennett is synonymous with.
He returned to TV to pen his first play for the small screen in 1972. Entitled A Day Out it was directed by the then little-known Stephen Frears. A black and white piece (despite the fact colour telly was now all the rage), it was set in 1911 and centred around a group of young men who made up Halifax cycling club. The poignant fact that these boys were about to go to war was not lost on audiences and the piece struck a chord with many.
The success of A Day Out lead to a number of other TV productions – for both the BBC and LWT. Then, in the 1980s, Bennett wrote the series he is probably best known for: Talking Heads (1987). In it six repressed characters, speak about their lives. It starred the cream of British acting talent: Bennett himself, Patricia Routledge, Maggie Smith, Stephanie Cole, Julie Walters and, perhaps most memorably, Thora Hird. Despite apparent nervousness about how the pieces would work on TV - the title itself is related to the fear many television execs have of seeing ‘talking heads’ on screen rather than action - the monologues were so highly regarded he revisited them 10 years later in 1998 and created another series. Both Talking Heads 1 and 2 have featured periodically on the British school curriculum ever since. If you haven’t had the pleasure of seeing them, A Chip in the Sugar, starring Bennett; A Bed Among the Lentils with Maggie Smith; and A Lady of Letters performed by Patricia Routledge, will form part of the BBC Four Alan Bennett retrospective.
Thora Hird in Talking Heads: A Cream Cracker Under the Settee
You’ve probably come across Bennett’s work on the big screen too. Two of his more recent stage works being produced, very successfully, for cinema – The Madness of King Georgeand BBC Films’ The History Boys. The latter featured the same cast as the National Theatre’s stage production and is the reason you’ll recognise the names (and faces) of Russell Tovey (Him and Her, Being Human), James Corden (Gavin and Stacey, The Wrong Mans) and Dominic Cooper (Mamma Mia!, The Duchess).
The History Boys was also voted the Nation’s Favourite play in a poll by English Touring Theatre last year. And if that doesn’t assure his national treasure status (sorry Alan), he’s also read the Shipping Forecast on Radio 4 (a genius idea from guest editor Michael Palin), and shared his favourite recipes with Nigel Slater.
So, suitably disabused of the notion of Bennett as solely a stage writer, I plan to have a crack at baking his Custard Tart (don't let anyone on the About the BBC team know about that), which I'll consume with a customary cuppa to celebrate the telly writer’s 80th birthday.
Hannah Khalil is Digital Producer, About the BBC Website and Blog.
