Alan Bennett at 80: Bennett Meets Hytner

This programme contains strong language.

This programme contains strong language.

He often says he started his career old back in the '60s. For nows as

though he has never aged. What seems nostalgic in his world is often the

opposite. I don't think I would like to be on your programme.

But his sense of the absurd is all the more powerful for its familiar

setting and his empathy for life's promise unfulfilled. I don't know

what it is, but I'm not getting everything out of life that I should

be getting, sort of feeling! But Alan Bennett knows his audience and

increasingly delights in shocking them. What you've been sucking is

some snot. Tonight he's talking to me, Nicholas Hytner on the occasion

of his birthday. We've worked together for more than 20 years. We

made movies together and staged his plays at the National Theatre. It's

a moment to look back at his astonishing career, his plays, films

and work for television. And his autobiographical writing,

his diaries and memoirs. It's a good time to look ahead too, so he's

agreed to a rare cross-examination, nothing something he usually enjoys.

And is according to his own admission, an awful person to

interview. This is Alan Bennett at 80!

Alan, I remember ten years ago, exactly, we were in rehearsal for

the History Boys. You were 70, there was a kick and you were extremely

grumpy to be acknowledged at all. So we're going to pass in silence over

the 80th birthday and I think that might be the kindest thing to do.

Test. I'm gonna try and start back in 1968 just briefly, your first

play, 40 Years On, how do you think you've changed as a playwright in

the nearly 50 years you've been writing? I think I'm a bit more

considerate of the audience than I used to be. In 40 Years On it didn't

matter much, but I think I used to write long monologues and immensely

long speeches and expect the audience to take them, whereas now I

hope I get on with it a bit more and also, you tend to give me a push in

that direction. So I'm kinder to them and also to the actors. I

remember of course it was partly because it was an unhappy

experience, but I remember in my second play getting on with Kenneth

Moore, he balked at the length of the speeches and I was outraged at

the time, but now I would fully understand it. Yeah, well now you're

up for suggestions from anybody really. One of the things that's

always amazed me is I remember when we were doing Wind in the Willows,

Tim McMullan and Adrian Scarborough, who played the two weasels, were

constantly coming up with stuff which ended up in the play. Well,

but that's jumping ahead, but in fact Wind in the Willows was when I

really first learnt to write, as it were, on the hop. I mean, I had to

write as we went along and I'd never been able to do that before. So

look, just in two minutes we've covered 40 Years On, a public

school, a getting on Labour MP and his home life, the river bank,

there's a misperception fostered by a particularly pompous, critical

brotherhood that you're at your best in Halifax. In fact, the material

ranges far and wide and I thought we'd start with a clip from the

Madness of King George, which started live at the National Theatre

as the madness of George III. King George in the first grip of his

madness has seized two of his small children from their beds and is now

pursued by the Queen and the rest of the court as he runs rampant through

Windsor Castle. You should stay. I have to talk it in order to keep up

with my foot. I'm scared. I thought he had taken you. What? The other

George, the fat one, you were not in my bed. I thought you had deceived

me with the son. I'll tell Elizabeth. No! Elizabeth, you leave

us, all of you go, just go. Go, you two, go. Do you want to talk? Talk,

talk away. What do you do with him that you do not do with me, madam?

Acting like pigs, the pair of you, huh? Those fat hands, that young

belly, those warm thighs. Do you think that you are mad? I don't

know. I don't know. Madness is such torment. Madness isn't half blind.

Madmen can stand. They skip, they dance. I talk. Talk and talk and

talk. I hear the words, I have to speak them, I have to empty my head

of the words. Something has happened. Something is not right. Oh

Charlotte. Oh. Oh. So that's Nigel Hawthorne and Helen Mirren. It was

an amazing script, an amazing play, an amazing screenplay. Is there

something particularly about the royal predicament that fascinates

you? Not really, I mean I've written about the Queen three times, I

suppose, but that's because she's? she's such a wonderful character. I

mean, she also carries her own plot with her, as in a way George III

does, but the audience knows what she's like, so you don't have to do

a great deal, you just have to slightly tweak it. You know, you'll

save pages and pages of exposition, they know where they are, they know

who she is and it also helps me, because one thing I'm not good at is

plot and to be given a plot is wonderful. I mean, with George III

it appealed partly because it was dramatic and it was also sad and

funny, but I also knew, you know, what was going to happen. Yeah,

let's have a look at the King Lear scene from George III, the scene

where everybody realises he's getting better. How does the King?

How does the king? Lord Thurlow, sir. Your majesty. Yes, we're

reading a spot of Shakespeare. Willis, give him the book. Oh, King

Lear. Is that wise? I had no idea what it was about, sir. I'm asleep,

apparently and Cordelia comes in and asks the doctor that scribbled here

how I am, off I go. Who's Cordelia? You are. Yes, but Willis can't do

it. He's a fine doctor, but a hopeless actor. Off you go. How

fares my royal lord? How does your majesty? You do me wrong to take me

out of the grave. Thou art a soul in bliss, but I am bound upon a wheel

of fire, that mine own tears to scald like molten lead. That's so

true. Pray do not mock me, I am a very foolish, fond old man. To deal

plainly I fear I am not in my perfect mind. Is that the end, your

majesty? Oh good lord, no. Cordelia dies, hanged and the shock of it

kills the king. So they all die. It's a tragedy. It's very affecting.

Well, it's the way I play it. Your majesty seems more yourself. Do I?

Yes, I do. Yeah, I've always been myself, even when I was ill. Only

now I seem myself. And that's the important thing. I have remembered

how to seem. What, what? What did your majesty say? What? I didn't say

anything. Besides Greville, you're not supposed to ask the King

questions, you should know that. What, what? Get him ready. That was

Nigel Hawthorne, John Wood, Ian Holmes and Rupert Graves in the

Madness of King George and that reminds me of how addicted you are

to historical truth. The scene itself is an invention, but King

Lear was a favourite play of George III's, he did identify with King

Lear, he loved Shakespeare and they knew he was getting better when the

verbal ticks, particularly the what, what's reappeared, so it's quite

hard a lot of the time to detach you from historical truth, even in the

interests of drama. No, that's right, because the scene after that

then they take him to parliament and show him to parliament, which of

course never happened and I remember when you first suggested that to me

I was thinking oh, you can't possibly do that, but then I thought

well why not? Yeah, so from Nigel Hawthorne right back to John

Gielgud, you have often organised your plays around whopping great

parts for wonderful leading actors, Gielgud, Guinness, Maggie Smith,

Richard Griffiths, Nigel Hawthorne, Francis de la Tour, something which

I often wish the younger generations of playwrights would realise is a

good idea. It's always a good idea to give great leading actors some

red meat to chew on. Gielgud, you lucked out really to get Gielgud for

your very first play, 40 Years On, maybe we'll just have a look at I

think the only clip that remains. This is the only bit that's left,

yes. That's right. From 40 Years On, Gielgud is the headmaster. This

school is Albion House, this huddle of buildings nestling in the fold of

the downs, once the home of a long line of English country gentlemen,

symbol of all that is most enduring in our hopes and traditions, 30

years ago to date, Tupper, the Germans marched into Poland and

you're picking your nose. See me afterwards. SPEAKER: TUPPER Yes,

sir. We are not a rich school, we're not a powerful school, not anymore.

And we don't set much store by cleverness here at Albion House, so

we don't run away with all the prizes. We used to do, of course, in

the old days and we must never forget those old days, but what we

must remember is that we have bequeathed our traditions to other

schools and if now they lead where we follow then it is because of

that. My successor is well known to you all in the person of Mr

Franklin. When the governors want your approval of their appointments,

Wigglesworth, actually we'll ask for it. Mr Franklin has long been my

senior housemaster and now he is promoted to pride of place. No doubt

with the future we'll see many changes, well, perhaps that is what

the future is for. We cannot stand still, even at the best of times. We

cannot stand still, even at the best of times. Your double edged,

ambiguous nostalgia runs through so many of your plays. You seem to be

regretting a past which perhaps never even existed, at the same time

as wanting to knock it all away and look to the future. Well, I think 40

Years On, I think with your first play you tend to lay out a programme

without probably knowing it, but we lay out a programme of the kind of

thing that you're going to be writing really and certainly it does

keep surfacing in stuff that I wrote subsequently. But watching Gielgud,

I'd forgotten how easily he just went from comedy to sadness and

nostalgia and how effortless it seemed for him, though it wasn't,

because when they first suggested that he play the part I couldn't

believe that he would possibly want to do it.

But then he did and to begin with it was disastrous, I mean he wouldn't

speak to the audience and the whole form of the play depends on the

headmaster treating the audience as an audience watching a school play.

But he wouldn't, he thought it was vulgar to talk to the audience, but

eventually Patrick Garland, who was directing, persuaded him to talk to

the audience and thereafter he would scarcely talk to anybody else.

But he also showed that quality of just being able to turn on a

sixpence and suddenly, Maggie Smith can do it as well, of being very

funny one minute and sad the next and you'd see every night the

famous, I think they're called the Terry tears from his mother I think,

that he could cry instantly. He'd be chatting away in the wings

and telling some endless story, which he was always doing, and then

he'd have to step on the stage and within a few seconds he was weeping

and the audience were weeping. And it was wonderful to see and to

see I suppose at the start of my career, I've always remembered it.

It's a tragedy that the whole thing wasn't recorded, it would be

nowadays, but it was wiped. And I think I remember you once telling me

that Noel Coward came and ticked him off one night, because he wasn't

trying hard enough, is that right? Yes, now that's one thing, he came

on the night, before the first night he came and we'd had a really rocky

ride in rehearsals and in previews and on the tour, because John G was

very, very slow to get his words and he'd been through a bad period in

his career and he had no confidence at all and we went to Manchester who

opened it on tour in Manchester in an empty theatre virtually and he

went on stage and he was so far from remembering his words.

He sometimes didn't remember the names of the other characters in the

play. Can I say, my parents saw it in Manchester and I remember vividly

they came back absolutely scandalised, worst play they'd ever

seen, John Gielgud a disgrace, so I'm here to corroborate that.

Well, I was embarrassed, but at the same time I knew so little about the

theatre, I thought well maybe this is what happens, you know, I wasn't

sure that this was proper behaviour, but he wasn't in the least bit

embarrassed that the audience saw him forgetting his words. They were

in Manchester, you know, it didn't matter. And then the play then went

to Brighton, where he knew a lot of people and where friends of his

began to filter in and this made him pull his socks up a bit and then he

began to remember his words, so that by the time he got to London two

weeks later he was just about, you know, on top of it and then Noel

Coward came to see him the night before it opened and wagged his

famous finger at him and told him that it was a very good play and he

was very good in it and gave him a real boost and it was fine then. But

it was a close run thing and I was very, very lucky that he did it, but

I was very lucky altogether really. Albion House, the school in 40 Years

On is self consciously a metaphor for England. I'm not sure if the

school in The History Boys is a metaphor for anything, but what is

it about school that makes it such a suitable setting for your plays?

Oh I think it's a closed society really, I think that's what I like

about it. A monastery would be the same, I think P. D. James sets

things in monasteries, you know, and I think it heightens the atmosphere

and you are shut off from the world and it's a stadium for eccentricity,

so well, it's a theatre within a theatre, as it were.

Yeah, and schoolmasters leading actors. Yes, and schoolmasters

overact really. Yeah, we'll go to The History Boys now, a scene where

Hector the schoolmaster, he's not overacting, a scene where Hector

perhaps unconsciously reveals himself talking about the Hardy

poem, Drummer Hodge, to the unhappiest of the pupils, Posner.

Uncoffined is a typical Hardy usage, it's a compound adjective formed by

putting un in front of the noun or verb, of course. Unkissed,

unrejoicing unconfessed, unembraced. It's a turn of phrase that brings

with it a sense of not sharing, of being out of it, whether because of

diffidence or shyness, but a holding back, not being in the swim. Can you

see that? Yes, sir. I felt that a bit.

The best moments in reading are when you come across something, a though,

a feeling, a way of looking at things that you'd thought special,

particular to you.. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person

you've never met. Maybe even someone long dead. And it's as if a hand has

come out and taken yours. It's wonderful watching Richard

though, you know, and also I don't think I noticed it when they were

doing it, but Sam Barnett, he just makes a tiny movement of his hand

and you think maybe that he's going to take his hand or one of them is

going to take the other's, whether Hector's going to take Posner's hand

and that's in a way I think the centre of the play. It is the heart

of the play and both of them are absolutely wonderful. Sam really

nails something there, which I think is very much a theme of your work,

which is the way loneliness constricts so many of us, the way so

many people find it difficult to break down the barriers that

separate them from the rest of humanity. You always, it seems to

me, manage to kind of create a conspiracy of the lonely, you feel a

thousand people a night acknowledging their own loneliness

watching your plays. These two characters here are profoundly

isolated, even Hector, who spends the entire play performing to a

classroom full of boys, he has real problems with proper human contact.

Expressing that through the discussion of a poem always seemed

incredibly moving to me. But in that scene you do suggest that one of the

consolations of a kind of inherent loneliness is literature. You find

fellowship in literature. What kind of literature do you find particular

fellowship in? Ooh. I'm very ill read, I don't know

if that sounds modest, but it's quite true. But it's too late, you

know, one of the advantages of being 80 is I now know that I can't do

anything about this and so here we are. I like American literature more

than I do contemporary English literature. I don't feel any of the

people writing in England can tell me very much. That may be unfair. I

like Philip Roth, for instance. I don't know, in a way writing seems

to me spoils you for reading, that if I'm trying to write something

I'll tend to read only, you know, superficial stuff. I don't read

anything which would make me think oh, I can't do as well as this,

which I'm very much prey to. Well I've always thought that one of the

defining features of your work is that you invite empathy for people

who if the kind of audience that comes to the theatre were to

encounter in real life they would run a mile. Absolutely. And I would

run a mile as well, yeah. So is writing in some way a means of

encountering stuff that you would not encounter or you would avoid

encountering in life? Yes, it is and it's also a way of

doing things that people wouldn't expect you to do either in writing

or in life. I mean, I think if things for the characters to say or

to do and I think well, people won't want to hear that from me and then I

think well why not? And particularly as I've got older that's much more

the case, that I quite consciously outflank the audience or try and

outflank my audience as I see them. I mean, when in The History Boys,

Dakin, the good looking boy who wants to impress the master, Irwin,

and suddenly says, "are there any circumstances in which you might

suck me off?" I remember thinking of that and it making me laugh, but

thinking oh, I couldn't do that and I could think well, Mark Ravenhill

could say that, I can't say that and I thought well why can't I say that?

And I do consciously slightly shock my audience, but it also slightly

shocks me as well. What I was really wondering was were

there any circumstances in which there was any chance of your sucking

me off. It's the end of term, I've got into Oxford, I thought we might

push the boat out. Anyway, I'll leave it on the table. I don't

understand this. Reckless, impulsive, immoral, how come there's

such a difference between the way you teach and the way you live? Why

are you so bold in argument in talking, but when it comes to the

point, when it's something that's actually happening, I mean now

you're so locking careful. Is it because you're a teacher and I'm a

boy? Obviously that. What you also do is you get an

audience, despite itself, to root for Dakin and to root for his

success in that particular project, which is an extraordinary thing for

particularly a National Theatre audience to want to do.

I remember there was one critic who found the idea of a boy trying to

seduce a teacher completely incredible and we put it to the

vote, I don't think you were there, in the rehearsal room, who here

tried to seduce a teacher and one member of that cast not only tried,

but succeeded. Yes, well when I was writing it my agent at that time, I

was telling her about it and somebody had said that this is very

unlikely, she said oh nonsense darling, I did the art master at

school, she listed various people and so, you know, I was encouraged

by that. But there's a real debate about education going on in The

History Boys, isn't there? Oh yes, yes. And where do you stand on that?

I believe very strongly, one of the few things I am passionate about is

that private education is wrong and that we'll only get somewhere in

England when private education is abolished and we are all of us

educated under the same system. There are wonderful things in

private schools and there are wonderful things in state schools.

They should be brought together, it ought not to be difficult to do, it

ought to be possible for instance at sixth form level and then lead on

from there. But I can't see it ever happening, but I do believe that

very strongly. You have written about how there was

a definite change in the way you wrote when you were diagnosed with

cancer. When you thought you were gonna die you said it acted like a

laxative on you. Well I put a spurt on, I think it

happened that when I was diagnosed in 1997 it was, you know, they said

I had a 50, 50 chance of surviving, but the truth was I actually had a

one in five chance, so I was very, very lucky. But it meant that by the

time we got to The History Boys, which was 2004, the shadow was

receding and so I think some of that renewed life and indeed vigour,

which is not a word that I normally associate with myself, fed into The

History Boys. The next clip we've got is from one

of your TV films from the 70s, Sunset Across the Bay, an old

Yorkshire married couple about to retire to Morecambe, to the seaside.

Me mother was a great worker for the Conservatives. That was with having

a shop. She was in the Primrose League. That seems to have gone now,

all that. Empire Day. Empire Day is the 24th of May, Empire Day is the

24th of May, Empire Day is the 24th of May and it all goes marching on.

All this singing, it's three o' clock in the morning. I saw another

feller come out of that end house. Oh aye? She's blonde now, saw her in

the laundrette this morning. She smiled, but I didn't tick on. Well

she's right enough. Her husband's in Stockport. It'd break heart, she had

that place spotless. Anyway, how do you expect folks to behave? These

days there's no incentive. We didn't behave like that. Only because we

didn't have the opportunity. Well, we were happy. I'm not saying we

weren't happy. We've lived round here all our lives. Courting in the

cemetery. Hey, only that once. It was my teeth you fell for. And I've

still got them. Oh heck. Fancy. What? I've slept in this bedroom 27

years and I've never seen that before. What? That crack in the

ceiling. Where? There. Oh I have. Well I haven't. Like a man smoking a

pipe. The couple, the man particularly,

are very like my parents. Harry Markham, he was an amateur actor all

his life until he retired, he worked for and then he retired and he was

in quite a lot, I think he was in loads of films, he was so genuine,

he's wonderful to see. But he's also like Dad in Cocktail Sticks played

by Jeff Rawle, which is at the other end of my career really, 30, 40

years later. And watching Sunset Across The Bay there were several

lines I noticed you used again in cocktail sticks. Your mam needing an

all over wash every time she went to spend a penny. That's right, yeah.

Well, because it was something my dad said usually, that's why.

But you are pretty ruthless, or you have become more ruthless in the way

you've used your parents, you've used the material of your own life

to turn them into art. Well I don't have anything else, that's the truth

of it. You know, a writer's life, I mean I didn't say it, Graham Greene

said it, it's very boring and even if you're, you know, like Graham

Greene and take off to the jungles of South America, nevertheless most

of the time you're sat in a room trying to write.

But you do seem to feel equitable about it, it's something that recurs

in your work, a kind of beadiness about the way artists can prey on

the ordinary lives of ordinary people.

Yes, well I do, I mean I suppose it's an awareness of how you use

people when you're writing, it's a theme that runs right through The

Lady in the Van and isn't really resolved in a way, except by her,

she resolves it when she dies and has her last laugh. And it also

occurs in Cocktail Sticks when my mother's line, a line that she said

is quoted "by, I've given you some script." She said that, did she?

Yeah, she said that and she would see my eyes light up if she said

something daft or something that's quotable and in those days I used to

keep notebooks and I would run away an write it down in my notebook. I

stopped keeping notebooks later on, because I had so many, but you know,

she was quite right, she did give me some script and so did my dad, but

in a much quieter way. You don't ever give yourself an easy time

though in the way you exploit the life around you. Your play Enjoy

imagines the last back to back in Leeds turned into a museum, long

before such things started to happen, it is actually quite a

prophetic play and was much more successful when it was revived

recently in the West End than it was when it was originally produced, but

you do feel distinctly uneasy about the way maybe you have embalmed a

particular generation of the Yorkshire working class. I am uneasy

about it, but I never thought of it as giving myself a hard time, it's

just another instance of something you can't resolve and that's what

the play is about really. On the other hand, one of the things that

surprised me looking back over your work was how often you come back to

marriages which are maybe a little bit like your parents, the marriage

in Sunset Across the Bay, the marriage between the king and queen

in the Madness of George III, marriages which are secure and

comfortable, but on the edge of being undermined or even

comprehensibly undermined by boredom, by loss, by missed

opportunity or even madness. Or shyness. Yes, I suppose that's true,

I suppose that also comes particularly from my parents, who

were very happily married, but who didn't have any expectations really,

but at the same time they felt that they wanted to break out somehow. I

could see all that in myself as well, but all these are things mixed

up with when people say "why do you write?" That's why I write, because

of all these unanswered questions really.

Yeah, but you seem to be drawn more to characters who miss their

opportunities rather than characters who seize them. Yes, I suppose that

is true. A lot of that will be to do with sex I suppose really. I think

looking back on your life and the things you remember are the things

that you didn't do, Habeas Corpus is all about that in a farcical way,

but everybody feels that, I'm sure. Thora Hird's Talking Head waiting

for the telegram is maybe the most poignant expression of exactly that.

We can take a look at that now. I gave him his tea and then we went

in and sat in the front room and he started undoing my buttons and

kissing and whatnot. Only I'd wanted to look nice, so I'd put on my best

frock and he couldn't fathom how it unfastened. I suggested taking it

off. But I didn't. That poor lamb, he got so fed up with these flaming

button things in the finish he gave up. He'd taken his leggings off,

he's put his, because they were hot. And he was in his shirt sleeves.

They were right rough khaki shirts then, real cheap and itchy. Anyway,

in the finish he gets up off the sofa and says, "oh, hang this lot,"

and he takes his shirt off and everything else besides. Doesn't say

a word, just takes it all off and stands there on the heart rug. And

he looked a picture, with the fire and all that. Not a mark on him. And

then he says, "take your clothes off now." And I didn't. I didn't. And I

wanted him so much. I don't know, it was just the way I'd been brought up

and he stands there looking down at me and then he picks his clothes up

and he goes next door and after a bit I heard the front door bang.

See, they look old in photographs compared to how they look now, only

they weren't. They were lads, same as you. And just as grand. I saw the

yellow thing the boy at the back brings, his sister fetched it round.

A telegram. And a vanilla slice for Mam. Then later on they had the

letter, rang in to me from the king, same as everybody did who lost

somebody. It's extraordinarily moving, that,

it's a whole life blighted by not going to bed, by not having sex with

the fiance that went off and got killed in the first world war and

that comes up it seems to me over and over, even the end of The

History Boys. During the play you've got these 18 year old lads whose

lives are in front of them and you allow them, all of them to tell us

at the end of the play what their lives amounted to and none of them

amounted to very much really. I suppose it's my view of my own

life, except that I've been very, very lucky, you know, I met my

partner quite late in life and so the last of my life was much happier

than the first part, but also I think it's in my nature really to

feel somehow that one's missed out. I mean, I think even when I was 17 I

was thinking that, you know, it's a joke as well though.

Yeah, it's surprising how few of the Talking Heads are a joke. Those are

people right on the margin, there's the Ripper's wife, there's a

paedophile, there's this poor old lady who missed out on the one thing

that she's convinced would have brought her happiness, there's the

peeping Tom and all of them absolutely naked, honest and if not

soliciting our sympathy, certainly winning it.

That seems to me to be a radical project to ask a television audience

to go with those people. I mean I can't say anything really,

I hope it's true but they came, not out of the blue, but they came like

poems. The first Talking Head I wrote, which was before the series,

was A Woman of No Importance for Patricia Wright, which is about a

woman who was dying and then I wrote these next six quite quickly. Then

there was a gap and then I wrote another six and people write to me

and say "would you like to come and talk to us? Perhaps you could write

a Talking Head," and you know, if I could just run it off and there's

nothing I would like more, you know, but you know, they came from I

suppose deep down, but it's not there anymore, I can't write them.

Thora Hird, like John Gielgud and Alec Guinness and later Richard

Griffiths and Nigel Hawthorne and Maggie Smith, she was a real muse

for you. Yes, she was a consummate

professional. She did a lot of rubbish, but whatever she did she

did it with her whole heart and she was also an old fashioned actress in

the sense that when she came to rehearsal, to radio rehearsals in

Broadcasting House, she would come fully in all her full gear, you

know, looking very glamorous as she saw it and she had a white coat and

a yellow hat and she'd say, "I've come as a poached egg," but you

know, she dressed up for the rehearsal, because that's what

actresses did and I like all that. Yeah. And she had an enormous

respect, rather like my parents, for the written word and if you were a

writer that was something in her eyes and in Waiting for the Telegram

it starts off with her speech and she said he sent me this play and in

the first speech, I mean honestly, I don't know, I mean Alan Bennett is

the only person I'd say a swear word for. And I thought there are no

swear words in it and then I realised the swear word she meant

was "penis", which occurs in the first speech. Which was a swear word

in Thora's book, but it was quite a risky script from her point, a

risque script from her point of view.

She says "Violet, I have to ask you this. Was the penis erect?" I said

Nurse Babty, that's not a word I would use. She said, "erect"? I said

"no, the other." She said "well Violet, you've had what we call a

stroke. You're sometimes funny with words." I said, "I'm not funny with

that word." She said "things have changed now, Violet. Penis is its

name. All the other names are just trying to make it more acceptable."

"Language is a weapon, Violet, we're at war." I said, "who with?" She

said "men." Right out there on the margins are

the spies who you've come back to several times, there's Alec Guinness

in The Old Country, Alan Bates in An Englishman Abroad and there's also

your play about Anthony Blunt, A Question of Attribution. We'll take

a look at that I hadn't planned on calling, but I

saw your light was on. I suppose it's what you'd call a function. Who

was there? Oh, everybody. Including your boss. We chatted. Do you not

get invited to occasions like that? No. You should. I'd feel a bit lost.

Oh, I don't think so. They were all there. Who? The great and the good,

everybody on your list. Your little list. Drink? Yeah, thanks. We've

come to the end of the road, you know? Yes, yes, yes. More and more

questions are being asked. We have to go back on our undertaking. The

consequences are gonna be embarrassing, not just for you but

for us too. Ice? It'll be painful. You'll be the object of scrutiny,

explanations will be sought after. Your history gone into. You will be

named. Attributed. It's a fake, I shall of course attract more

interest than the genuine article. We know there were five, Burgess,

MacLean the first two, Philby the Third, you're the fourth, who's the

five? You don't give me his name I can't save you. Would you care to

see my x-rays? That's James Fox and David Calder in

A Question of Attribution. What is it about spies? Why have you come

back to them over and over? Well people say it's because I'm gay, but

it never seemed to me there was much connection between that, even though

so many of the spies were. I liked the notion of the Cambridge spies

betraying their class. It's an ambiguity about England as well,

about being in many ways very conservative with a small C about

England and yet knowing there's so much wrong with it that spying is

excusable, because they thought that they were doing something to improve

things really, they were morally on the right side.

None of the spies spied for money and the treason they're supposed to

have committed doesn't nowadays seem to me to be a particularly important

crime. And you know, the Edward Snowden stuff, I'm wholly on his

side really, that's by the way, but anyway.

And Habit of Art you work through that tension between concealment and

revelation, between letting it all hang out, which is W. H. Auden and

deriving fantastic dramatic power from holding it all in, which is

Benjamin Britten and that's at the heart of that play. Auden talks

about how his later work is more scrupulous than his earlier work and

he berates Britten later on in the play for not being fully honest in

his operas. We've got a clip from that now. There are some writers who

set their sights on the Nobel Prize even before they pick up the pen. Is

like that and I'm afraid Thomas Mann. Never underestimate the role

of the will in the artistic life. Some writers are all will. Talent

you can dispense with, but not will. The will is paramount. Not joy, not

delight, but grin application. What were we talking about? Thomas Mann,

Death in Venice. Two of his sisters committed suicide, as did two of his

sons. He was a genuine artist. Chastity Evans. Yes. Where's Peter?

I said Toronto. Do you repeat yourself? They tell me I do, but its

not my fault. They treat me like an oddicle and that's what oddicles do,

they repeat themselves. Arid? What? Your music, I wouldn't have said it

was arid. Detached, dispassionate, attuned something of an indulgence,

but not arid. Do you always mean what you write? Well in the sense

that Shostakovich sometimes doesn't. Yes, I think so. Don't you? Well I

do now, I didn't always. As a young man I used to leave meaning to

chance. If it sounded alright I let the meaning take care of itself,

that's why I find some of my early stuff so embarrassing. But in those

days I'd ask you what a line meant and rather than explain it you'd

just write another. Very naughty. Except that now I'm more scrupulous,

I make an effort to tell the truth and people say it's dull and my

early stuff is better. That's Richard Griffiths as Auden and Alex

Jennings as Benjamin Britten. Do you feel that your later work has become

more open and more scrupulous? Oh yes, I do. I don't care what people

think about me and my objection about people knowing more about

one's private life was that I didn't want to be put in a pigeonhole, I

didn't want to be labelled as gay and that was it, you know. I just

wanted it to be, you know, I wanted to be my own man, as it were. And

Habit of Art it feel almost as if Auden is who you want to be and

Britten is who you fear you are. Auden is out there soliciting

blowjobs off rent boys and mistaking respectable biographers for the rent

boy and Britten is uptight and restrained. Britten didn't really

loosen up as he got older, I mean he remained very much as he'd always

been and again it's an unresolved thing, which you have to write the

play in order to resolve. Yeah and as you say in Cocktail Sticks, which

is your recent one act play, your most recent one act play about

yourself, you don't put yourself in what you write, you find yourself

there. Yes, I think that's absolutely true. In a way nowhere is

that more marked than in The Lady in the Van, which is ostensibly about

Miss Shepherd, certainly in the play, as much about Alan Bennett as

it is about Miss Shepherd. We never filmed The Lady in the Van,

but it exists obviously as a memoir. I wondered if you would read

something from it and then we could talk about how we might film it if

we do. I maybe should explain that Miss

Shepherd was a woman who lived in a van in the street I lived in, in

Camden Town and at some point when the council put down yellow lines

and I said well, she'd better bring the van into my garden, which is

quite small, thinking this would be three months or so and it turned out

to be for 15 years. Anyway, this is something that happened in 1975.

Miss Shepherd rings and when I open the door she makes a beeline for the

kitchen stairs. "I'd like to see you, I've called several times. I

wonder whether I can use the toilet first." I say, "I think this is

pushing it a bit." "I'm not pushing it at all, I'll just do the

interview better if I can use the toilet first." Afterwards she sits

down in her green Mac and purple headscarf, the knuckles of one

large, mottled hand resting on the clean scrubbed table and explains

how she's devised a method of getting on the wireless. "Was to ask

the BBC to give me a phone in programme, something someone like

you could get put on in a jiffy. Perhaps there would be gaps filled

with nice, classical music. I know one, Prelude in Liebestraum by

Liszt, I believe he was a Catholic priest. It means love's dream, only

not the sexy stuff, it's the love of God and the sanctification of labour

and so on, which would recommend it to celibates like you and me,

possibly." Shocked at this tentative bracketing of our conditions I

quickly get rid of her and though it's a bitter cold night, I open the

windows wide to get rid of the smell.

Well with the play you wrote a play based on your memoir with Maggie

Smith and now nearly 15 years later we're trying to pitch it as a movie,

we're going around with our begging bowls. Maybe what I could do is tell

you some of the things that are confusing the movie people, we could

work it out here in front of the camera. Those who don't know the

story remain confused about what on earth you were doing and why you let

her in and why you let her stay there.

Well it wasn't a one off decision, as it were. The decision I made was,

as I said, that she could come in for three months or so and then she

would go on with the van and go somewhere else. Her will was

immensely strong and she was determined to stay. And it was just

too much trouble to get rid of her really and that's one way of looking

at it. But I think it's also laziness, I just, you know, it would

have been such a fag to try and get rid of her, she probably had

squatter's rights after a year or so.

You're pretty ruthless about yourself in the memoir and in the

play and in the play two actors played you, because you divide

yourself into the writer and the landlord. The landlord is the bulk

of it, the major character, the householder who allows this old lady

to drive her van into his drive and stay there, the writer who

occasionally separates from the landlord, initially reluctant to

have anything to do with this ridiculous story, he's got enough

old ladies in his life already. He's writing about his mother, he's

writing about all his old aunties; the writer eventually realises that

this is the best material he's ever gonna get and he then exploits her

and I think one of the things you never quite satisfy yourself about

in the story and I hope in the film is who is the more ruthless of the

two of you, the writer who is going to turn her into a national myth or

she who takes 14 years of your life by living in your drive?

I think she's probably more ruthless, I think she never gave an

inch. But the notion that I invited her in, in order to write about her

is so ludicrous. Richard Ingram's always took this view in Private Eye

and it's so ludicrous as who would do that anyway. But she had an iron

will, she never at any point said "thank you" for anything. And I

didn't want to be thanked, but at the same time if she had thanked you

it would have been a chink in her armour and she never exposed that

chink, you know, and it's why she survived living on the street really

and had survived all her life and quite a dramatic life it was. I

ended up slightly when I found out the facts of her life thinking well,

she's had a much more dramatic life than I've had and so in a sense I

became almost envious of her, which is absurd. I mean, as I say in the

book, it was like Dickens when she died, you know, the whole thing, you

could make sense of her life and all the facts were laid out.

Yeah, and amongst the things we're trying to do at the moment is to

engineer the movie so that the revelations are spread through its

two hours rather than it all come tumbling out at the end. Well it's

easier to do that on film than it was on stage, you couldn't really

have done it on stage. But to return to somewhere near where we began,

you may be 80, but we're still doing new stuff, so there's lots to come.

Well I don't know there's lots to come. There's that to come, all

being well. I find it harder and harder to write, but then I always

have found it hard to write, so I'm at the stage of covering reams and

reams of paper and not getting anywhere, but that's always been the

case. You say it to people, and I never really believe in writer's

block, I think all writing is writer's block really, it's all so

hard, but I don't think it's tragically hard or anything like

that, it's difficult. But people say oh well, you've done so much and it

doesn't seem to me I've done so much, but the stuff you've written

doesn't seem to be like upholstery, it's not something you can settle

back in and think oh well I did that and I've done so many plays and so

on and it's not a comfort that you've done all this stuff, it's

just a rebuke as much as anything else.

You think well I can't do it now and writing is about now, it's about

what you're doing this morning, you know, what you're sitting at the

table, staring out of the window and trying to do and that's still the

situation now whatever age I am. Well I'm looking forward to as much

more as you care to write.