At the same time, though, this is pretty much the exact same book as Keeping On Keeping On, and that one was a bit of a challenge to read as well. It kind of feels as though Bennett is on a mission to publish literally everything that he’s ever written, and even though he’s a decent writer, that does get a bit dull after a while. I’d read Stephen King’s shopping lists, but I wouldn’t read Bennett’s. And yet in a way, that’s kind of what we get here. But Bennett absolutely martyrs himself on the altar of his sexuality and sexual inadequacy. I would hope that I temper my more downbeat stories with rather more humour than Bennett shows here. I'm presently struggling through the diaries. With all the people that Bennett knew, you would have thought they would be full of amusing anecdotes but, really, if I have to read about ANOTHER visit to some flipping church and its marvellous burial crypt, I dare say I'll fling the darn book across the room! He also wears his learning like a trophy, taking pleasure in some little literary whimsy or simile that you need to be an Oxford don to comprehend. Now I know how my sister used to feel when I used "big words" that, to me, with my grammar school education, were commonplace but to her were just "showing off"! It had never occurred to me as a child that there were no photographs of my parents’ wedding. Along with the cut-glass fruit bowl, the stand of cork table-mats and the lady leashing in her Alsatian, a wedding photograph was a component of the sideboard of every house of every friend or relative I had been into. Typical was the wedding photograph of Uncle George and Aunty Flo, taken around 1925. Uncle George is in a suit, wing collar and spats, Aunty Flo in a short white wedding dress and veil. They are standing on the sooty steps of St Mary of Bethany, Tong Road in Wortley, where Uncle George sang in the choir, and are watched off camera by their respective families, the Rostrons and the Bennetts, and also by anybody who happened to be waiting at the tram stop at the bottom of Fourteenth Avenue. Bennett was born in Leeds and attended Oxford University, where he studied history and performed with the Oxford Revue. He stayed to teach and research medieval history at the university for several years. His collaboration as writer and performer with Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook in the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe at the 1960 Edinburgh Festival brought him instant fame and later a Special Tony Award. He gave up academia, and turned to writing full time, his first stage play, Forty Years On, being produced in 1968. He also became known for writing dramatic monologues Talking Heads which ran in 1988, and 1999 on BBC1 earning a British Academy Television Award.

Untold Stories by Alan Bennett, Signed - AbeBooks Untold Stories by Alan Bennett, Signed - AbeBooks

Certainly in all her excursions into unreality Mam remained the shy, unassuming woman she had always been, none of her fantasies extravagant, her claims, however irrational they might be, always modest. She might be ill, disturbed, mad even, but she still knew her place. The mill gone, my grandparents bought a hardware shop in West Vale outside Halifax but that too went bankrupt, through sheer kind-heartedness my mother said, and letting too much stuff out on credit. There is a picture of the shop in the sheaf of crumpled photographs and newspaper clippings that passes for our family album, the shop assistants lined up on the steps flanked by those Karnak columns of linoleum that enfiladed every hardware store down to my own childhood, and peeping through the door my mother’s blurred ten-year-old face. The writing, of course, is excellent. The autobiography (or, more accurately, the biography of the Bennett/Peel families) that takes up the first third of the book is fascinating, warm, touching, funny and poignant. But it stops rather abruptly, leaving Bennett set for a dull career in higher education. And yet, a few years later, he is on Broadway. How did that happen?

At some point when he was still a boy Dad took it into his head to learn the violin. Why he chose an instrument that in its initial stages is so unrewarding I don’t know; it’s one of the many questions I never got round to asking him. He got no help at home, where he could only practise in the freezing parlour, the Gimmer too mean even to let him have any light, so that he had to manage with what there was from the gas lamp in the street outside. Whether he was born with perfect pitch I don’t know, but in later life he would play along to the hymns on the wireless, telling you the notes of the tune he was accompanying as easily as if he was spelling a word. In happier circumstances he would have been a professional violinist but there was never any hope of that and a butcher he remained, working first for the Co-op then, in 1946, buying a shop of his own, which he had to sell ten years later because of ill-health, then buying a smaller one and the same thing happening. Having made no money and the job having given him precious little satisfaction, he was never so happy as when in 1966 he was able to abandon butchering for good. Over the next ten years this came to be the pattern. The onset of a bout of depression would fetch us home for a while but when no immediate recovery was forthcoming we would take ourselves off again while Dad was left to cope. Or to care, as the phrase is nowadays. Dad was the carer. We cared, of course, but we still had lives to lead: Dad was retired – he had all the time in the world to care. Roger Wilmut, From Fringe to Flying Circus – Celebrating a Unique Generation of Comedy 1960–1980, Eyre Methuen, 1980, ISBN 978-0-413-46950-2 Ferguson, Euan (31 May 2014). "The Complainers; The Story of Women and Art; Harry and Paul's Story of the Twos – review". The Guardian.

Alan Bennett - Literature - British Council Alan Bennett - Literature - British Council

Cheryl Crawford / Equity Liberty Theatre / Barry Manilow / National Theatre of the Deaf / Diana Ross / Lily Tomlin (1977) Nightingale, Benedict (9 February 2009). "Nicholas Hytner on his time at the National Theatre". Times Online. Archived from the original on 16 June 2011. Archived version is available without subscription. In the film for television Not Only But Always, about the careers of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Bennett is portrayed by Alan Cox. Beyond the Fringe (with Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, and Dudley Moore). London: Souvenir Press, 1962, and New York: Random House, 1963 The drowning, though, straightaway shed light on an incident early on in my mother’s depression which at the time I’d thought almost a joke. Dad had gone out and we were alone in the house. Motioning me into the passage where we would not be over-heard, she again whispered that she had done something terrible. I was having none of it, but she got hold of my arm, pulled me up the stairs and pointed to the bathroom, though she would not go in. There were six inches of water in the bath.

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Bennett wrote The Lady in the Van based on his experiences with an eccentric woman called Miss Shepherd, who lived on Bennett's driveway in a series of dilapidated vans for more than fifteen years. It was first published in 1989 as an essay in the London Review of Books. In 1990 he published it in book form. In 1999 he adapted it into a stage play, which starred Maggie Smith and was directed by Nicholas Hytner. The stage play includes two characters named Alan Bennett. On 21 February 2009 it was broadcast as a radio play on BBC Radio 4, with Maggie Smith reprising her role and Alan Bennett playing himself. He adapted the story again for a 2015 film, with Maggie Smith reprising her role again, and Nicholas Hytner directing again. In the film Alex Jennings plays the two versions of Bennett, although Alan Bennett appears in a cameo at the very end of the film. As time went on these futile discussions would become less intimate (less caring even), the topography quite spread out with the parties not even in adjoining rooms. Dad would be sitting by the living-room fire while Mam hovered tearfully in the doorway of the pantry, the kitchen in between empty. And in a story that is so closely focused on Bennett's family, his brother Gordon is mentioned so fleetingly that he seems like Trotsky to Alan's Stalin. Was there a family falling-out? Jury, Louise. "Historic night for Alan Bennett as his new play dominates the Olivier awards", The Independent, 21 February 2005

Alan Bennett · Untold Stories · LRB 30 September 1999 Alan Bennett · Untold Stories · LRB 30 September 1999

As Mr Parr is noting this down Dad gently touches my knee. This is a man who never touches, seldom kisses but Oxford-educated as I am and regularly to be seen on television I fail to appreciate the magnitude of the gesture and blunder on. Alan Bennett (born 9 May 1934) is an English playwright, author, actor and screenwriter. Over his entertainment career he has received numerous awards and honours including two BAFTA Awards, four Laurence Olivier Awards, and two Tony Awards. He also earned an Academy Award nomination for his film The Madness of King George (1994). In 2005 he received the Society of London Theatre Special Award. Rosemary Harris / Marin Mazzie / Terrence McNally / Sonny Tilders and Creature Technology Company / Jason Michael Webb / Harold Wheeler (2019) In August 1960, Bennett – along with Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook – gained fame after an appearance at the Edinburgh Festival in the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe, with the show continuing in London and New York. He also appeared in My Father Knew Lloyd George. His television comedy sketch series On the Margin (1966) was erased; the BBC re-used expensive videotape rather than keep it in the archives. However, in 2014 it was announced that audio copies of the entire series had been found. [4] The splother attendant on the wedding was harder to get round and Mam’s fear of the occasion persisted until there came a point, Dad told me, when they nearly broke off their engagement because neither of them could see a way of getting over this first necessary hurdle. Eventually Dad sought the advice of the local vicar.

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What was agitating her, and maybe it agitated my father too, as he was in many ways more shy even than her, was the ceremony itself and the churchful of people it must inevitably involve. Marriage is a kind of going public and I can see, as Dad can’t or won’t, that coming to live in the village, which has maybe brought on this second bout forty years later, is a kind of going public too. In July 2018, Allelujah!, a comic drama by Bennett about a National Health Service hospital threatened with closure, opened at London's Bridge Theatre to critical acclaim. [17] Personal life [ edit ] The headstone, in Larch Wood (Railway Cutting) cemetery, of Alan Bennett's Uncle Clarence, subject of a 1985 radio monologue He manages to get naked again, streaking across Parliament Square, generally displaying such a facility for stripping off that it’s hard not to feel that’s where his future lies. He turns out to be from Coventry, which is of course a place with some tradition of public nudity”. Dad shakes his head, meaning that these questions seem to him to have little to do with Mam’s current illness. At least, that’s what I take him to mean and I pretend not to see, because while I tend to agree, I don’t think now is the time to make an issue of it. Mam!’ I said, exasperated, but she put her hand to my mouth, pointed at the living-room door then wrote ‘TALKING’ in wavering letters on a pad, mutely shaking her head.