Thought For The Day: Alan Bennett

via @Bennett-Diaries.

The eponymous documentary inspired by Alan Bennett's Diaries is on BBC4 again tomorrow.

1987 Fagburn Awards: Books Of The Year

1. Homintern: How Gay Culture Liberated The Modern World - Gregory Woods

Magnificent, magisterial, massive, a masterpiece.

2. The Descent Of Man - Grayson Perry

3. Keeping On Keeping On - Alan Bennett.

4. Party Animals: My Family And Other Communists - David Aaronovitch

5. Suspicious Minds: Why People Believe Conspiracy Theories - Rob Brotherton *

* This was actually published right at the end of 2015. If you feel chronologically insulted feel free to imagine Who Rules The World? by Noam Chomsky or Shrinking Violets: A Field Guide To Shyness by Joe Moran here.

Alan Bennett: Query

I hear word Dame Alan may have a book coming out - can anyone confirm this?

Prick Up Your Ears: Oh Joe

John Lahr’s 1978 biography of the playwright Joe Orton may seem an unlikely choice for a book to give you hope. After all, Orton’s success was not only a long time coming (a decade of abject failure was crowned by a six-month spell in prison for defacing library books), but when it did finally arrive in 1964 (with the West End production of Entertaining Mr Sloane) it lasted only until 9 August 1967. It was brought to a bloody and premature end by his long-term lover, Kenneth Halliwell, who bludgeoned Orton to death with a hammer before taking his own life. Orton was only 34 years old.

Yet, it is these early years of struggle and anonymity that make Orton’s life story such a fascinating and, yes, inspirational read... 

Guardian Books.

Alan Bennett's Prick Up Your Ears (sorry about the Spanish subtitles) is probably Fagburn's favourite 'gay film'.

For a great gay reclamation of Joe, see Simon Shepherd's Because We're Queers.

Oh, did I ever tell you I've been to the flat...

Alan Bennett: May Days

8 May. A feeling of bereavement in the streets. I shop for supper and unprompted a grey-haired woman in the fish shop bursts out: ‘It means I shall have a Tory government for the rest of my life.’

In the library they say: ‘Good morning, though we’ve just been trying to think what’s good about it.’

I wanted a Labour government so that I could stop thinking about politics, knowing that the nation’s affairs were in the hands of a party which, even if it was often foolish, was at least well-intentioned. Now we have another decade of the self-interested and the self-seeking, ready to sell off what’s left of our liberal institutions and loot the rest to their own advantage. It’s not a government of the nation but a government of half the nation, a true legacy of Mrs Thatcher. Work is the only escape, which fortunately moves along a little.

9 May. My birthday. A nice woman in a leopardskin coat who always speaks wishes me a happy birthday. I say that I wish it was. ‘Why? What’s happened?’ ‘Last Thursday. The election.’ ‘Oh, you don’t want to worry about that. They’re all the same.’ At which point (we are in Shepherd’s grocers) I hear myself as very rarely shouting at the top of my voice. ‘No, they are not all the same. This lot are self-seeking liars, the cabinet included, and we’re landed with them for another five years.’ She tries to calm me down but I tell her not to bother, with other customers peeping round the shelves to see who is making all this din.

She is waiting outside the shop with a cake she has bought me for my birthday and I kind of apologise. But as I walk back home I wonder how long it will be before this crew turn their attention to the BBC.

From Alan Bennett's diary, London Review Of Books.

The drawing is an old one he unearthed of Miss Shepherd, the lady in the van.

PS Alan writes about recording the Christmas edition of Private Passions for the BBC World Service, which you can hear here.

Property: Van Not Included

Other 'Hot homes with star connections' for sale and featured in the Independent's Homes And Property section are Michelangelo's Tuscan estate, 'Grimmy's X Factor House' and Gok Wan's old house - 'near Hampstead Heath'.

Alan Bennett: The Author And His Typewriter

From Radio Times - click to enlarge.

Alan Bennett: How Can You?

'The lies on the front page of the Mail are so vulgar and glaring. Occasionally people say they like my work and then I see they have a copy of the Mail, and you think, ‘Well, how can you?’'

Alan Bennett is profiled in The Guardian.

One wonders how Alan's Daily Mail-reading fans will cope with the news that one of your actual 'national treasures' is a big fan of Jeremy Corbyn?

This travels over rather familar terrain, though there are some new insights into his not coming out ('I didn’t want to be in anybody’s pocket, that’s why I didn’t want to be thought to be gay, particularly. Pigeonholed. And then as you get older it just ceases to matter.'), and Rupert Thomas ('his partner of 23 years'); 'I’m chary of saying to people that I’m very happy or even that I’m happy. You tell people that you’re happy and they are bored by that. But we are.'

Apparently, he's got a new film coming out soon.

Alan Bennett: The Lady In The Van

"The story told by this film took place 40 and more years ago and Miss Shepherd is long since dead. She was difficult and eccentric but above all she was poor.

"And these days particularly the poor don't get much of a look in. Poverty is a moral failing today as it was under the Tudors.

"If the film has a point, it's about fairness and tolerance and however begrudgingly helping the less fortunate, who are not well thought of these days.

"And now likely to be even less so."

Alan Bennett. 

Watch the trailer with that Maggie Smith - Baftas all round?

It's not out til November, soz.

Nicholas Hytner: By Alan Bennett

Some thoughts:

His rehearsals are sometimes lessons; they are never lectures.

He has no sense of entitlement. As director of the National Theatre he has found himself drafted on to prestigious committees and in quite august company. He doesn’t take this as his due but is delighted by it.

He likes risk and is always up for it. The dodgiest parts of my stuff – the talking furniture in The Habit of Art, the porn scene in People – are what gets him going.

He delights in spectacle and is not afraid of being popular. I’m not sure if I said this or someone else (I hope a well-wisher) but there is in his character an iron streak of tinsel.

And he gives lovely parties. ...

From The Guardian - from the National Theatre programme for Man And Superman.

Mr Hytner has now left the National...

In Conversation: Alan Bennett And Nicholas Hytner

Enjoy!

Alan Bennett: Celebrating Britain's Best

"I thought, why not Swaledale? Or medieval churches. Or even, with all its shortcomings, the National Trust. But what I think we are best at in England - I do not say Britain - what I think we are best at in England, better than all the rest, is hypocrisy.

Take London; we extol its beauty and its dignity while at the same time we're happy to sell it off to the highest bidder. Or highest builder.

We glory in Shakespeare yet we close our public libraries.

A substantial minority of our children receive a better education than the rest because of the social situation of the parents. Then we wonder why things at the top do not change or society improve. But we know why. It's because we are hypocrites.

Our policemen are wonderful, provided you're white and middle class and don't take to the streets. And dying in custody is what happens in South America. It doesn't happen here.

And it gets into the language. We think irony very English and are rather proud of it. But in literary terms it's how we have it both ways. A refined hypocrisy.

And in language these days, words which start off as good and meaningful, terms like environment and energy saving, rapidly lose any credence because converted into political or PR slogans, ending up the clichéd stuff of an estate agents' brochure. A manual for hypocrisy.

A memorable phrase in Hamlet, and one of the few that hasn't been picked up as a quotation or a title for something else, is when Claudius is arranging for Hamlet to be arrested and executed when he gets to our shores. And in his letter he says; "Do it England". And we say we do it, or we're going to do it, but we don't. Scotland does it. And Wales. But not England.

In England, what we do best is lip service. And before you stampede for the Basildon bond or rather skitter for the Twitter I must say that I don't exempt myself from these strictures. How should I? I am English, I am a hypocrite. "

Alan was talking on Radio 4's The World At One, as part of their series, Celebrating Britain's Best.

You may hear it here.

WH Auden: GI Bride

I sit in one of the dives on 52nd Street, where WH Auden found refuge in New York. With the old country on the brink of war, Auden sat in a gay bar called Dizzy and wroteSeptember 1, 1939: “Uncertain and afraid/ As the clever hopes expire/ Of a low dishonest decade”.

Auden excised this poem from later collections because he thought it too much of a sermon. He especially hated the famous line “we must love one another or die” which he came to think silly. The desire to stop writing such direct, political poetry was, he said, precisely why he had left England, although in truth Auden stayed in New York for a reason that had nothing to do with his writing. He met Chester Kallman there and fell in love. Auden wasn’t a refugee from an idea. He was, as Alan Bennett brilliantly said, an early GI bride.

Philip Collins, The Times.

Gregory Woods on Auden's 'erotic poem', The Platonic Blow.

"Shall I rim you?" I whispered. 

He shifted his limbs in assent, 

Turned on his side and opened his legs, let me pass 

To the dark parts behind. 

I kissed as I went 

The great thick cord that ran back from his balls to his arse. 

Prying the buttocks aside, I nosed my way in 

Down the shaggy slopes. I came to the puckered goal. 

It was quick to my licking. He pressed his crotch to my chin. 

His thighs squirmed as my tongue wormed in his hole. 

His sensations yearned for consummation. He untucked 

His legs and lay panting, hot as a teen-age boy. 

Naked, enlarged, charged, aching to get sucked, 

Clawing the sheet, all his pores open to joy...

And that is your actual gay poetry.

Alan Bennett: Lisa Says

Certain authors have fan clubs: Austen, Trollope, Lewis Carroll and, more recently, Anthony Powell. Their work gets fenced off by enthusiasts, and the casual reader may feel the need of credentials to read them. Poets don't have fans in quite this way, though in the days of "the love that dare not speak its name" Housman was a telltale volume to have on the bookshelf, along with Forrest Reid, say, or Denton Welch. And Betjeman began as a somewhat eccentric taste, his admirers a bit of a club, before the poetry made a space for itself and was taken up by the nation...

Alan Bennett writes on his favourite poets for the Guardian.

Fagburn was thrilled to see at Mr Bennett's exhibition at The Bodleian Library, that Alan also writes whilst looking onto a small Lisa Simpson toy. 

We could be sisters!

Alan Bennett Watch: TV Or Not TV?

Alan Bennett has revealed that he enjoys watching "rubbish" on television and is a fan of Midsomer Murders, Family Guy and ''maybe the first Big Brother''.

The playwright, 80, is about to have a play, Denmark Hill, premiere on radio for the first time.

He said that he and partner Rupert Thomas ''probably (watch) more rubbish than we should''.

He told Radio Times magazine: ''I tend not to watch drama, and I don't like stand-up, so that cuts out an enormous amount. Apart from Stewart Lee, I like him because he's offensive. And Jeremy Hardy, but he's only on radio. The others just seem to be showing off.''

He added: ''We watch Midsomer Murders. It's not all rubbish. Andrew Graham-Dixon, that's not rubbish.''

Asked whether he watched any reality shows, Bennett told the magazine: ''Very few. Maybe the first Big Brother but I thought, 'God, they're all repellent.' I tend not to watch anything where one person is eliminated each week. There was even a programme about allotments: I thought, 'This'll be all right.' Then they introduced that format there! Allotments isn't a competitive activity.''

Quotes lovingly lifted by the Daily Telegraph (and me).

Alana B's play Denmark Hill will be broadcast by the Home Service on Saturday. 

He says he can't be arsed working with people in television anymore as they're a load of idiots.

Basically.

People's March For The NHS: A Day Out

Our Alan is supporting The People's March For The NHS.

It culminates with a rally in Trafalgar Square on Saturday September 6th.

See if you can guess who they've booked as the headline speaker?

PS Whilst in Oxford recently, Fagburn saw the fountain pen Alan wrote with til The Madness of George III, stood outside TE Lawrence's old house, and played a theremin. This bucket list is getting ever shorter!

Alan Bennett: Old Man Talking

I am now eighty, an age that entitles one to be listened to though not necessarily heeded. I had never been much concerned with politics until the 1980s when they became difficult to avoid. Without ever having been particularly left-wing I am happy never to have trod that dreary safari from left to right which generally comes with age, a trip writers in particular seem drawn to, Amis, Osborne, Larkin, Iris Murdoch all ending up at the spectrum’s crusty and clichéd end.

If I haven’t, it’s partly due to circumstances: there has been so little that has happened to England since the 1980s that I have been happy about or felt able to endorse. One has only had to stand still to become a radical. Though that, too, sounds like an old man talking. Still, I don’t regret it and one thing it’s always a pleasure to see on television is the occasional programme about ancient and persistent activists, old ladies recounting their early struggles for women’s rights or battles for birth control, veteran campers from Greenham Common, cheerful, good-humoured and radical as they ever were, still – though it’s not a word I care for – feisty after all these years. That to me is wisdom as disillusion is not.

London Review of Books.

from a Sermon before the University, King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, 1st June.

Which Alan takes as an opportunity to argue for the abolition of public schools.

Agreed, they have a funny habit of turning perfectly nice little children into egregious, entitled little shits.

A cynic might think that is their main function.

Alan Bennett: Not Gay

BBC News.

'Being gay?
'Chance would be a fine thing.'
'Mind you the whippets might not like it.'
'Or me mam - she'd probably throw an Eccle's cake at t'wall'.

Thought For The Day: Alan Bennett

"Spying is excusable because they thought that they were doing something to improve things, that they were morally on the right side

"None of the spies spied for money, They all did it out of conviction, it was not to do with material gain. The treason they're supposed to have committed doesn't nowadays seem to me to be a particularly important crime. The Edward Snowden stuff – I'm wholly on his side."

The Guardian quotes from an unpublished Radio Times interview.

She's 80 on Friday!

x

PS The Daily Mail and Mail Online readers, surprisingly, not that keen on this GAY COMMUNIST TREACHERY!

Alan Bennett: Sneering Subversive

An ever-so slightly hysterical response to a few rather mild lines in Alan Bennett's 2013 diary in the LRB.
Absolutely classic old school Daily Mail.
Happy new year!
x

PS Here's Alan reading a Shipping Forecast yesterday - absolutely classic Radio 4.