Three years ago Alan Bennett visited the BFI Southbank to discuss the influence of his northern roots in a conversation that formed part of the BFI's Northern Voices season.
The blurb on YouTube says:
Few writers have successfully mined Northern culture and specific northern speech patterns as Alan Bennett. Growing up in Leeds, he listened in on the chatter of his relatives, absorbing the patter of domestic conversation, which would emerge across a glittering and much-loved range of plays, particularly those written for television. Here, Bennett explores the way Northern culture is so integral to his creative process.
I thought of this old television commercial a while ago, but I've only just found it because I had convinced myself it was advertising Viennetta.
What I also found, thanks to a Guardian article, is that Alan Bennett praised it in his diary of 2003 for the London Review of Books:
30 August. A commercial for Carte D’Or ice cream I would have been very pleased to have written. A family which includes the aged grandmother is having Sunday dinner. ‘Pass your father the potatoes,’ the mother says to the grown-up son. ‘He’s not your father,’ snaps the grandmother. ‘We never knew who your father was.’
There is an awkward silence, then the mother ushers the grandmother from the table saying: ‘Come along, mother, I’ll take you upstairs.’ On the way out of the room the old lady passes an open piano on which (this is the stroke of genius) she suddenly hits a petulant discord. It lasts all of a minute and is worth a dozen pages of dialogue. Why it’s advertising ice cream I’m not sure.
But, says the Guardian, despite Bennett's misgivings, the commercial helped double Carte D'Or's sales.
Nandi Msezane says migrant workers prop up the UK’s social care system, but are now being forced out.
Cameron Joseph argues that Donald Trump is borrowing a playbook from other elected leaders who have used the tools of democracy to destroy it: "Would-be autocrats often move to eliminate structural checks on their power. They intimidate opposition parties, threaten potential dissenters within their own ranks, and defy the courts. Autocrats punish and bully the news media, protect allies from legal prosecution while targeting political opponents, and purge senior military and government ranks of career staff in favor of loyalists."
"There were numerous attempts at creating Labour-affiliated clubs, as Labour became a serious party of government for the first time. It is also easy to see why the inherent contradictions around that gave these clubs a limited appeal within the Labour Party." Seth Thévoz on the attempts to establish a London club for Labour parliamentarians.
"It was a reminder of a time when democratic politics wasn’t viewed with contempt but was understood as a form of collective expression and - for some (for very many in the 1940s) - as a means of making a better world." Municipal Dreams looks at the at creation and reception of the 1943 County of London Plan.
Katherine Stockton explores the problematic implications of Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys.
30 March. Obituary of Dudley M. in yesterday’s Independent by Harry Thompson, the biographer of Peter Cook, whose side one might therefore expect him to take. Instead Thompson very much takes Dudley’s line on himself: namely, that he was only brought into Beyond the Fringe as a musical afterthought.
In fact he came in as the acknowledged star of the Oxford cabaret circuit, and right through the run of Beyond the Fringe remained the darling of the audience. Cheerful, extrovert and on his own musical ground very sure of himself, he only started to play up the melancholy and portray himself as a tortured clown, a line journalists are always happy to encourage, after he’d teamed up with Peter and subsequently gone into analysis or psychotherapy.
Obviously Dudley did get sadder as he got older and coping with Peter’s drunkenness can have been no joke. But portraying himself as shy, put upon and intimidated by Jonathan, Peter and to a lesser extent myself was a construction that came later. On and off the stage during Beyond the Fringe he was sunny, social and effortlessly successful. A sad clown he wasn’t.
We all professed to like jazz, though it was not as modish as it had been for the generation of Larkin and Amis a few years before. Jazz was no longer the anthem of youth and disaffection. ...
Still, we would go along to hear Dudley play, particularly when Peter Cook’s The Establishment opened in New York. ... But knowing nothing of its history or development and never having listened to it much, I was baffled and bored by jazz, while Jonathan Miller’s experience of it didn’t stretch much beyond undergraduate hops where it served as a background to his vigorous though uncoordinated attempts to jive.
Perhaps because he was the youngest of the four of us Peter’s lack of interest in jazz was the most obvious, though he would later have heard a good deal more of Dudley’s playing than Jonathan or I did. When in old clips of Not Only ... But Also Dudley is seen playing or parodying jazz as the play-out at the finish, Peter will sometimes be standing by the piano with a sophisticated smile, clicking his fingers to what he hopes may be the beat.
This was both a pose and a piss-take but it came closer to the reality than Peter would perhaps have liked to admit. ...
None of which is of much interest except to make plain that whatever the public’s appreciation of his musical talent, Dudley was nevertheless corralled for four years with three other performers who didn’t share his enthusiasm and then for ten or a dozen years more with Peter who regarded his music as at best an interlude between the comedy.
So when later in life with that slightly aggrieved air with which he discussed his early career Dudley complained of being unappreciated by his colleagues in Beyond the Fringe, this was partly what it was about.
I mentioned that the folk-tinged Springfields, which also included his sister Dusty, were the first British group to have a top 20 hit in the US. And I also mentioned two great pieces of trivia:
Today I found out that Tom Springfield was already dead when I wrote about him last weekend. He died on 27 July, some 10 days before Judith Durham.
The news seems to have just broken, so there have been no obituaries in the papers yet. I'll tweet any without a paywall that I see.
As I wrote when paying tribute to Judith Durham, her bandmate from The Seekers, Bruce Woodley, wrote three songs with Paul Simon. (Woodley is on the right of the group as you look at the thumbnail above.)
One of them, Red Rubber Ball, reached number 2 in the US singles chart when recorded by The Cyrkle. That band also recorded Simon and Woodley's I Wish You Could Be Here.
Their third collaboration was Cloudy, which appeared on the Simon and Garfunkel album Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, where it was credited to Paul Simon alone.
I love Paul Simon's music more than is decent, but it wasn't a wholly a surprise to read that this had happened.
All three Simon and Woodley compositions were recorded by The Seekers, and here is their take on Cloudy.
If I have a criticism, it's that this version isn't cloudy at all. It's pure sunshine - a reminder of how good Judith Durham's voice was and how good the male members of the group were as instrumentalists and close harmony singers.
The tinkly line on the piano (if that is what is being used) was probably played by Tom Springfield, who had much to do with the group's success as a songwriter and mentor. (His own folk-to-pop group The Springfields were the first British group to have a top 20 hit in the US,)
In writing this I came across two great facts about Tom Springfield (who was Dusty's brother):
And that's where he came across the Russian folk tune that he turned into The Seekers' best-selling single, The Carnival is Over.
Most of these were wiped long ago, including the drama series Mystery Hall, which I think I remember watching in 1967.
But the lost Southern series I really mourn is The Master from 1966, because it was based on a book by T.H. White.
As the blurb on my Puffin edition says:
This is, in some ways, a surprising book to come from the author of The Sword in the Stone and Mistress Masham's Repose, for it is, at first reading, a straightforward thriller.
In fact it's almost a James Bond thriller, in that it involves an evil mastermind bent on world domination. His lair is inside Rockall, a rock in the North Atlantic that Britain claimed two years before The Master was published in 1957. And because it is a children's book he is foiled, not by 007, but by a pair of twins and their dog.
The blurb goes on to suggest that the book
also has the quality of writing and the subtle undertones which made the late T.H. White a superlative story-teller.
The undertones are certainly there, including discussion of the morality of warfare. And the first sentence, enticing and perfectly pitched at its intended audience to be see what a fine writer White is:
It was a blistering day in July, and the swell of the sea was like melted lemonade bottles.
The other evening I discovered a Twitter account dedicated to missing television programmes and run by Sam Czopanser. (I suspect this is a pseudonym as it was the name of a character in a largely lost 1970 science fiction series called The Adventures of Don Quick.) Anyone with an interest in missing TV should follow him.
And in a recent thread Sam included TV Times cuttings on The Master.
There was the full-page feature you can see above, including an overacting John Laurie two years, the two young heroes and the only adult goodie George Baker.
Then there was the cast list from TV Times - the first episode was broadcast on 11 January 1966.
Adrienne Poster, under the name Adrienne Posta, appeared in films of the 1960s and early 1970s, with Up the Junction being the most notable, and also did a lot of televions and recorded pop singles.
The reference to Paul Guess having already appeared in Oliver! reminded me of Alan Bennett's diary entry, later published in his Writing Home, after auditioning boys for his own play 40 Years On:
Many belong to a species of stage boy, only related to childhood by their small size. All the other attributes of boyhood - youth, gaiety, innocence - have long since gone. Squat creatures, seemingly weaned on Woodbines, they are the boys who have been in Oliver! Lionel Bart has cut a swathe through the nation's youth like the 1914-18 war. They are the new Lost Generation.
Guess can't have suffered too badly, as he was in the cast for the play's first night.
From the Dartmouth Films website:
Eric Ravilious: Drawn to War is a true story. Eric Ravilious is as compelling and enigmatic as his art. Set against the dramatic wartime locations that inspire him, Margy Kinmonth’s film brings to life this brilliant but still grossly undervalued British artist. Caught in the crossfire of war 80 years ago, Ravilious’s legacy largely sank without trace, until now.
Made with the blessing of the Ravilious Estate, this first full length feature documentary about Ravilious unfolds in his own words, through previously unseen private correspondence and rare archive film.
Shot entirely on location in the UK, Portugal and Ireland, the film features Ai Weiwei, Alan Bennett, Grayson Perry, Robert Macfarlane with Freddie Fox, Tamsin Greig and many more.
The same page will give you an impressive list of cinemas that are showing the film from 1 July, including the Phoenix in Leicester.
Believers in the QAnon conspiracy theory spent the last three years believing that Donald Trump was taking on powerful paedophile networks that had hitherto ruled the world.
Trump's defeat did not discourage them: they were certain Joe Biden's inauguration day would see power cuts, the declaration of martial law and his arrest along with all other leading Democrats.
In the Guardian, Julia Carrie Wong reports on the reaction of some QAnon believers to yesterday's events (or lack of them):
As Biden took the oath of office just before noon on Wednesday, a QAnon channel on Telegram lit up with laments.
"We’ve been lied to," wrote one person.
"I think we have been fooled like no other,” another responded, adding: “Hate to say it. Held on to hope til this very moment."
"I feel like I’m losing my mind,” said a third. “I don’t know what to believe anymore."
"Anyone else feeling beyond let down right now?" read a popular post on a QAnon message board. "It’s like being a kid and seeing the big gift under the tree thinking it is exactly what you want only to open it and realize it was a lump of coal the whole time."
There are religious precedents for such feelings of deflation. The 19th-century American Baptist preacher William Miller forecast that Christ would return to Earth on 22 October 1844.
After He failed to appear, the non-event became known among Miller's followers as "The Great Disappointment".
But, reading about the baffled QAnon adherents, I thought first of the above sketch from Beyond the Fringe.
When Humphrey Carpenter interviewed the leading lights of the 1960s satire boom for his book That Was Satire, That Was in the late 1990s, he found that what was once youthful enthusiasm had by now curdled into disillusionment.
One by one, they expressed dismay at the culture of facetious cynicism their work had spawned, their complaints coalescing into a dismal litany of regret.
John Bird: ‘Everything is a branch of comedy now. Everybody is a comedian. Everything is subversive. And I find that very tiresome.’
Barry Humphries: ‘Everyone is being satirical, everything is a send-up. There’s an infuriating frivolity, cynicism and finally a vacuousness.’
Christopher Booker: ‘Peter Cook once said, back in the 1960s, “Britain is in danger of sinking giggling into the sea,” and I think we really are doing that now.’And, says Coe, that observation by Cook was developed into a Beyond the Fringe sketch about a bunch of young, would-be radical journalists who won’t admit they have sold their soul to a rapacious newspaper proprietor:
COOK: Whenever the old man has a cocktail party, there’s about ten of us – young, progressive people – we all gather up the far end of the room and … quite openly, behind our hands, we snigger at him.
BENNETT: Well, I don’t know, that doesn’t seem very much to me.
COOK: A snigger here, a snigger there – it all adds up.
The sketch makes it clear that laughter is not just ineffectual as a form of protest, but that it actually replaces protest.And if you do seek out the full article you will find that Michael Frayn, in his introduction to the published script of Beyond the Fringe, made the same point at the time.
The idea that a corrupt elite is screwing a noble people is powerful and pervasive and by no means new. It is therefore no surprise that it is reflected in comedy. It is certainly a view of politics that is popular amongst neo-liberals.
It was at the heart of the popular 1980s situation comedy Yes Minister which repeatedly showed viewers that their political leaders and civil servants were feather-bedding themselves at the tax-payers’ expense.
This was why Margaret Thatcher loved the series: it expressed her view that, as representative politics was a moral hazard, it should be replaced as far as possible by the market.Put like that, satire sounds distinctly right wing.
However, the cumulative effect of the same jokes ridiculing politicians and highlighting their supposed foibles can only further reinforce mistrust in the public realm, a mistrust that some political forces seek to exploit – and neo-liberals are amongst the nicest of those forces.
Comedy has always relied on stereotypes. There was a time when the Irish were thick; the Scots careful with their money; mothers-in-law fierce and ugly; and the Welsh stole and shagged sheep. The corrupt politician is one such stereotype, one that is neither racist nor sexist and seemingly acceptable to all.You'll have to read both article and assemble all the pieces of the argument for yourself - it's this damned heat.
And what is Hislop's principal message? Week in and week out, it is that most pretty much all politicians are corrupt, deluded, incompetent, second-rate and hypocritical. Hislop's message is delivered with enviable deftness and wit, and very often it is irresistible. But it is also good-naturedly merciless. And extremely repetitive.
There is never any sign that Hislop allows of exceptions; or that he has a political hero; or even, with the occasional honourable mention for Vince Cable, that there are politicians whom he respects.
The impression he always gives is that today's politicians are uniformly unworthy of their inheritance, not to be compared with some previous golden age of statesmanlike effectiveness.
I’ve been to a few cricket matches, and yet I know very little about cricket. What strikes me is the skill that’s required of the people who watch it, who know the instant they have to stop talking to their neighbour and look across the field just in time to see the ball leave the bowler’s hand in the direction of the batsman, and then to stay focused on the result – hits, misses, runs, catches and so on – until this vital little sequence comes to an end and the conversation can be resumed.
For instance: “You see, after his wife died, they were very helpful. They got him that house … [pause, click of bat on ball, unrewarded cry of “Catch it!”] … somewhere up Shipley way, and he’s been living there with the lady from Wetherspoon’s ever since.”It's Alan Bennett meets Murray Bennett.
It provides a pleasing portrait of country cricket at an outground in that era. Marquees; adults on deckchairs, children sitting cross-legged on the grass.
7 September. Ed Kemp rings, thoughtfully it seems to me, to say that his mother has died aged 91. She was the widow of Eric Kemp, my tutor at Exeter College and later bishop of Chichester, though I don’t recall meeting her in Oxford, but only in Chichester where, though she was the bishop’s wife, she enjoyed working as an usherette in the theatre and thus (I hope) scandalising that Trollopean place.
19 September. Long piece in the Guardian sports section about Joey Barton, the difficult (and sometimes violent) footballer who has been transferred from Burnley to Rangers and is in trouble again.
He is obviously clever, though in a slightly psychopathic way, and given to gnomic Muhammad Ali-like utterances. He’s rightly proud of his self-education and being smarter than most footballers while still being his own worst enemy.
He habitually uses ‘critique’ to mean ‘criticise’ and would make a good character in something
9 July 1968 - Many belong to a species of stage boy, only related to childhood by their small size. All the other attributes of boyhood - youth, gaiety, innocence - have long since gone. Squat creatures, seemingly weaned on Woodbines, they are the boys who have been in Oliver! Lionel Bart has cut a swathe through the nation's youth like the 1914-18 war. They are the new Lost Generation.
Alan Bennett Writing Home (1994)
Of all the honours that fell upon Virginia's head, none, I think, pleased her more than the Evening Standard Award for the Tallest Woman Writer of 1927, an award she took by a neck from Elizabeth Bowen.
And rightly, I think, for she was in a very real sense the tallest writer I have ever known. Which is not to say that her stories were tall. They were not. They were short. But she did stand head and shoulders above her contemporaries, and sometimes of course, much more so. Dylan Thomas for instance, a man of great literary stature, only came up to her waist. And sometimes not even to there.
If I think of Virginia now it is as she was when I last saw her in the spring of 1938 outside the changing rooms in the London Library. There she stood, all flushed and hot after a hard day’s reading. Impulsively perhaps I went up to her and seized her hand. "It’s Mrs Woolf, isn’t it?" "Is it?" she said and looked at me out of those large limpid eyes. ‘Is it? I often wonder,’ and she wandered away.Bennett says somewhere that this passage originally mentioned Cyril Connolly and was rewritten to feature Dylan Thomas instead when he complained. Connolly was disappointed. He wanted to stay in but be made taller.
Southwark Council is twisting the arms of Albion Primary School to sell a significant part of its site. With that money the school will be rebuilt. The rebuild will I’m sure be lovely. But the principle is alarming.He asks which state school will be the next for this treatment.
But can one ever forget him, those china blue eyes, that boyish, almost girlish figure and that silly, silly giggle. The boys at school had called him Tee Hee Lawrence.
