Alan Bennett A Taste of My Life

Welcome to A Taste of My Life, the show that serves up people's lives on a plate.

Everything we eat and cook paints a revealing picture of who we are, and how we live our lives.

Which is why we'll be taking a culinary trip down memory lane with our very special guest.

Perhaps the first thing to say about today's guest is he's an intensely private man

who finds himself reluctantly in the limelight over and over again,

thanks to his wit and wry observations of English life.

He's entertained audiences and viewers on stage, in the cinema,

and most notably with his landmark television series, Talking Heads.

We had a spot of excitement yesterday.

We ran into a bit of Mother's past.

I said to her, "I didn't know you had a past. I thought I was your past."

He's won critical acclaim at every stage of his life,

with Beyond The Fringe in the 1960s, The Madness Of King George in the nineties.

And most recently with his play, The History Boys which won a staggering six Tony awards.

Yes, I'm extremely privileged to be spending time in the kitchen with playwright Alan Bennett.

Coming up today's show, Alan remembers eating out with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.

Peter Cook particularly was very much a man of the world.

Patricia Routledge, the woman behind Hyacinth Bouquet, remembers dining out with Alan.

Alan, it's down memory lane.

There was an intake of breath and you said, "Oh, no, not white meat!"

And he confesses how his mind was on other things

when his Broadway hit, The History Boys, won six Tony awards.

The doorman adjusted my tie without so much as a by-your-leave,

and he was the first of about 20 people in the course of the evening who said, "Excuse me."

And everybody adjusted my tie!

Alan Bennett, welcome to A Taste Of My Life.

You were born in Leeds in 1934.

And what were Mum and Dad like?

My dad was a butcher.

They were quite shy people. They both cooked in the house.

And you couldn't distinguish really who had cooked what, if my mother had cooked it or my father had cooked it.

He didn't make what he called a lot of splother about it.

But he just could cook.

But the way they cooked, both of them, they cooked meat for a long, long time.

You never had anything rare or medium rare.

Even though he was a butcher?

Never had even a medium-rare steak until I left home.

So presumably, your father was cooking stews and pies.

Yes, and the favourite was meat-and-potato pie.

Pre-war dishes like Alan's dad's meat-and-potato pie are rarely made today.

It's a real shame, as this is an old-fashioned stomach filler.

Again, it would be done with stewing steak, I suppose.

And with a lot of fairly thin gravy.

Take your time cooking the meat.

As ever, the longer cooked, the longer savoured, giving the pie a much richer flavour.

The crust would be soft underneath and crispy on top.

I think that was my brother's favourite, as well as mine.

He remembers exactly the same dishes that I do.

-It's the best bit, the pastry, that soggy bit underneath.

-That's right.

Yes, a good old-fashioned crumbly pastry is the best topping for this dish.

-This is the sort of thing that you'd eat at home midweek?

-Yes.

I don't think they'd put potatoes in, would they, now? I don't know, maybe.

I've never seen one from since... I've certainly never eaten one since I was a child.

You wouldn't have any sort of formal meals, would you?

There wouldn't be the dinner party?

No, no.

The nearest you'd get to that would be high tea on the Sunday.

But then that would be opening a tin of salmon, that would be the high point.

Did you have a proper breakfast?

No, my mother always thought everyone else in the nation did, but we didn't.

She always assumed every other family sat down to a cooked breakfast,

and then went off to work, or school or whatever.

I think she never thought that she made it as a proper housewife, I think, really.

And that was one of the reasons.

She also thought that the life that you read about, or she read about, in women's magazines,

was the life people led, so she thought people had coffee mornings and stuff like that.

And it was total fantasy.

In 1944, he gave up his job at the Co-op and went to work for a butcher in Guildford.

This butcher, besides running a butchering business, also ran a horse-meat business on the side.

And he used to go and fetch these carcasses on a big lorry,

and sometimes I'd go with him on this lorry out into the depths of Surrey.

And in the middle of a field, there would be a cow or a horse that had died a few days previously,

so it was all blown up with its legs in the air.

And they'd winch this onto the lorry and bring it back to a slaughterhouse in Guildford, and dismember it.

Aged 10, I used to sit there and watch this.

And not be nauseated, or think anything terrible.

Just thinking, that was my life.

All the sweet things, they're the things I remember when I was a kid.

Yes, the thing my mum used to do best, was custard.

We didn't call it custard tart, we just called it custard, but it was in a pastry case,

with custard and nutmeg on the top.

A timeless classic, the knack to custard tart

is making sure the milk is hot enough

when stirring it into the eggs and sugar.

They were quite deep.

They weren't like thin French custard tarts, they were quite plump and thick.

-A deep layer, and it's quivery and wobbly.

-Yes.

A disaster sometimes when somehow the custard went under the pastry. I don't know how that happened.

And it is that little bit of nutmeg or cinnamon on top.

A nifty tip for not spilling the filling,

is simply to top it up once it's already in the oven.

-Can I offer you a little bit of custard tart?

-Yes, indeed.

I hope it's going to be as good as the ones you remember from home.

-Well, it's the right size.

-I think you described home life at one point as a celebration of ordinariness.

Well, yes.

Except that when I was going through it, I wasn't inclined to celebrate it, probably.

I rather wished it was less ordinary.

That tastes the same.

That's lovely.

It didn't seem ordinary then?

No, it did seem ordinary then, that was the thing.

You just thought, "How can I ever get out of this?

"How can I ever get out of Leeds?"

My mother had a thing about,

later on in life, she thought everybody had cocktail parties.

And she couldn't pronounce "cocktail".

She always called it, "cock-TAIL".

And when they moved from Leeds to the village, she thought they ought to entertain

and maybe have a cocktail party.

But they never got round to it.

When my father died, and she moved to live with my brother, I was clearing out the kitchen cupboards,

and there at the back was a little tube of cocktail sticks.

She'd had the curious notion that one day they'd live like other people.

In the mid-1950s, Alan left home and went to Oxford University.

It was during this time that his culinary experiences slowly started to mature.

That was really the first time I'd eaten out at night.

I've never eaten at night before.

I can remember, and it was only about 8 o'clock,

it wasn't late at night, but I remember thinking, "This is really living!"

But there weren't that many cafes there.

There weren't many restaurants opened.

It was still fairly austere.

I had a thing about eating in public.

I was quite shy of it.

Partly because when we were little,

we used to go off hiking every Sunday with my mum and dad.

We'd go very often through Guiseley near Leeds.

There was a fish-and-chip shop.

And you'd get the fish and chips and some bread and butter, and sit at the tables and have it.

There was a big notice saying - patrons must not eat their own food.

My mother always insisted on taking our own bread and butter.

So we'd be having the fish and chips, and then she'd kind of smuggle slices of bread and butter onto the table.

And I was petrified we'd be found out and turned out of the place.

# Here's a little song I wrote

# You might want to see it note for note, don't worry... #

It remained with me really for years afterwards,

the notion that I was going to be shamed in a restaurant.

-The shame of being caught?

-Yes.

# When you worry, you make it double, don't worry... #

The counters were always quite high up, and you couldn't see over the counter.

And so it was quite a mysterious process.

Was there a particular point when you knew what you wanted to do?

I never had a notion that I was a writer for a very long time.

In those days, you used to have to put your profession in your passport.

My profession in my passport was teacher,

from when I used to teach at Oxford.

And I didn't change it from teacher, to writer,

until I'd written, I think, probably three plays.

How was it that you suddenly ended up on the stage with Beyond The Fringe?

In my own college, they used to have what we called "smoking concerts".

And so I started writing sketches for those, and then somebody picked that up

and said, "Did I want to go to the Fringe of the Edinburgh Festival, with a revue?"

And I did it, in 1959, and that turned out to be Beyond The Fringe.

It was sheer accident really.

Then we did start eating in much grander style.

Peter Cook particularly was very much a man of the world.

He sort of introduced us to it.

We used to go to a French restaurant on Cranbourne Street,

opposite Leicester Square tube, called Chez Solange.

-Oh, yes.

-And it was a really nice, a old-fashioned French restaurant with banquettes on the side.

And the waitresses were all middle-aged, the way they are in France, and very motherly.

But it was quite a posh restaurant.

And I used to go with Dudley Moore quite a lot.

And we both of us had the same thing, which was a globe artichoke, an artichoke vinaigrette.

Globe artichokes are frighteningly simple to cook, but rather frightening to eat.

Cut off the stem and boil in salty water with a lemon for half an hour.

I was very pleased with myself, that I actually knew how to eat a globe artichoke,

-which is a complicated procedure.

-Especially with people watching.

-That's right.

And this thing of actually picking food up in your fingers.

I think the only one I've eaten publicly, I didn't eat the choke.

I knew I was supposed to eat it, but I wasn't sure how.

-And I didn't want people to know I didn't.

-Oh, I'm very sophisticated!

Really, if you think about it, at this point, you must have felt, "I'm actually quite successful."

Because it was certainly very well reviewed.

Oh, yes. No, no. When you're young, you don't think like that.

It's not something you'd striven for, it just happened.

Maybe you don't enjoy it as much for that reason, I don't know.

Only when you can easily detach the leaves with a light tug, will you know this creature is ready to eat.

This is the sort of thing

that I would be really quite terrified of, if somebody presented me with this

when I was younger. I wouldn't know what to do with it.

A nightmare to eat if you were having lunch at Buckingham Palace, I'd have thought.

Or anywhere where you don't want to make a mess.

Is there that thing of audiences appreciating something, you suddenly think,

"Those people are applauding what I've written or what I've done."

And certainly the early bits with Beyond The Fringe,

when you're working out which of you, Peter Cook, or Jonathan Miller,

who's getting the most attention?

Yes, there was all of that.

We were all very competitive.

That was one of the joys of going on to do something on one's own,

that you weren't competing with anyone any more.

The subsequent history of Peter and Dudley was a lot to do with that,

I think, really, between the two of them.

Still to come on A Taste Of My Life - Alan reveals his frustrations with cooking.

You go to all this trouble and cook these elaborate meals and then all people do is eat them.

He tells us the simple secret to his rice pudding.

-This is your magic ingredient, isn't it?

-Well...

Evaporated milk.

And he talks about his relief, surviving his recent battle with cancer.

In Untold Stories, there was a point when you said you thought the book would be published posthumously.

I didn't want it to be published posthumously.

I'm rather happy to have been around when it came out.

So, I'm absolutely fascinated by the thought of Alan Bennett the cook. What sort of cook are you?

I can't do quick things.

It's all slow cooking. I can't flash fry or anything like that.

No. You can do rice pudding.

Yes, I can do rice pudding.

The trouble with cooking is that, you go to all this trouble,

you cook these elaborate meals and then all people do is eat them!

And you have, you want...something more permanent than that, really.

I suppose that's why I write.

Once they've eaten it, that's it.

If we pop down to the kitchen at some point, would you show me your rice pudding?

Show me how you do it. I would love to know.

Your rice pudding is quite a simple one, isn't it?

Well, it is, rather. It's just two of everything, really.

Two spoons of rice, two spoons of sugar, Gas Mark 2 for two hours.

Now, this is your magic ingredient, isn't it?

Well... Evaporated milk.

It's just the eggs and sugar and then evaporated milk.

I like it cold. If you let it go cold, it goes much thicker.

And a bit of vanilla extract.

Do you ever put any cinnamon in?

-No. Just nutmeg. I sometimes have some jam with it.

-Do you stir your jam in, or leave it in the lumps?

I don't have a doctrinaire approach.

You don't have a perfection pudding.

I was thinking of all the things that you've done over the years

and I was interested in how you choose what to do.

For instance, with The Madness Of King George, why him in particular?

-What was the fascination?

-It was such a self-contained subject.

I had known about it for years because I was a historian.

I knew that he got ill suddenly and he recovered suddenly,

which makes it ideal for a play.

And also, he was an interesting character.

If you can find a character who takes over the play, as it were,

then the play doesn't quite write itself, but it's much easier to do.

Oh, it's lovely. Mmm!

It's not bad, is it?

Oh, no, it is good. Didn't have to be done for three hours like mine, either.

It's a compound adjective formed by putting "un" in front of the noun or verb, of course.

Unkissed, unrejoicing...

unconfessed.

People love the things that you do so much.

How does that sit with the fact that you're very much a private man?

-Don't know.

-It doesn't bother you?

Well... I'm trying to be as gracious as possible.

You avoid as much of the hoo-hah as possible. Or I do.

-You have avoided a few awards ceremonies.

-But at the same time, the Tonys...

We went over for the Tonys. And I'm glad we did.

I was wearing a bow tie that I had tied myself

and it was already on the skew when we left the house.

When we got out of the cab, the doorman adjusted my tie without so much as a by-your-leave.

And he was the first of about 20 people in the course of the evening.

And everybody adjusted my tie.

I know that you have said that you didn't want to watch the messages

that we have got from some of your friends.

But we have got a message from Patricia Routledge.

What was she like to work with?

She's very... Her sense of timing is superb.

It's literally split-second,

in the sense that she can look at the audience and look at the camera in the same second.

And very few people can do that.

I know you don't want to see her message until later.

The viewers, I know would love to see it. And so would I.

Alan, it's down memory lane which I know you love.

I have got the very thing for you - a real treat.

He wrote the first monologue ever, for me, called A Woman Of No Importance.

I don't run to the doctor every five minutes.

On the last occasion, Dr Copland sat me down

and said, "Miss Schofield, if I saw my other patients as seldom as I see you, I should be out of business."

We laughed.

I'm going to take you back over 20 years.

We stayed at a little inn.

And we decided we would invite you to dinner,

as we knew that you were up there on the Yorkshire-Lancashire border.

We had a small sherry before dinner in the bar.

There were only three of us to dine that night.

And the menu was brought for our scrutiny.

Your eyes fell upon the first item of the starters.

And you pronounced it with all the weight of a High Court judge

presiding over a very serious case of racial discrimination.

White...bait.

White...bait.

Well, you're going to have whitebait here today.

A little seasoned flour.

Dry fish.

Look at them. Wonderful.

His importance is underestimated and has been for a long time.

I think now, with the crowning glory of History Boys,

which has blazed a trail throughout the East and throughout the West.

And he's finally getting his desserts and perhaps those critics who spike and pick

at his earlier work will reassess it.

There was an intake of breath and you said, "Oh, no, not whitebait.

"I can never resist a Florida cocktail".

So it shall be yours.

Complete with maraschino cherry, of course.

I should have deep red fingernails and my hair hanging over my face

but I had a lot to do this morning.

I shall join you. Bon appetite.

We've got your culinary heaven and hell all on one table here.

Cheese on toast. Do you like a bit of bacon with it?

Is this a favourite of yours, cheese on toast?

Yes.

If you say it's comfort food, that implies that one eats it when you're miserable,

but we just like it.

I actually don't like...

I don't take any comfort in food.

If I'm anxious or need cheering up,

eating is not what I do, really.

-There must have been times in your life, maybe, when you weren't so happy.

-If I'm unhappy, I don't eat.

It's the best way to slim, really.

It seems very strange to me that if you are anxious, and then you eat...

But I'm interested that you don't find that there's a been a moment

when you wanted to desperately turn to a bit of cheese on toast to make yourself feel better.

That's comforting. That's what I call comfort food. It makes me feel good.

I don't need comforting!

There is a picture of Alan Bennett that is painted that is quite comforting.

It's quite a cuddly thing.

But you aren't happy with that?

-It doesn't seem like me.

-You don't recognise this image?

No. When I said earlier on,

when I was a child watching these carcasses being dismembered,

I feel that much closer to me than the toasted teacake notion, really.

And now, for Alan's final feast, I'm rustling up a coffee and walnut cake.

A beautifully comforting and luscious combination of flavours - this is a warm and delightful treat

over which to reflect on one's life's achievements.

With plenty of buttercream, this would have you gasping for breath if you tackled it on your own.

And rounding it all off, Alan has requested that old reliable - a good, old-fashioned cup of tea.

Alan, I think of a final feast as being incredibly lavish.

A table full of food. But yours is elegant in its simplicity, really.

I can't imagine being hungry in those circumstances - that's partly what it is.

And the notion of a final feast is, to me, rather suspect.

What next?

Not next to eat.

I don't know.

More of the same, probably.

I hope...

I'm just thankful to be...

still employable, really.

-Is there anything you haven't done that you would like to do?

-I don't see it like that.

I just see it in terms of going to the table each day

and just trying to do a bit more. That's all.

Have you any regrets? Not necessarily work-wise.

It all depends what sort of life you want.

A writer's life is quite a dull life, unless you're that sort of writer, you don't necessarily travel much.

And I would probably like to have seen more of the world than I have.

But on the other hand, I understand what Philip Larkin meant when he said,

"I wouldn't mind going to China, if I could come back the same afternoon."

-In theory, I would like to do it, but probably...

-Something you said.

When you weren't very well last year, and when you made the comment about it being a bore,

illness being a bore, do you find that, since then,

since your recovery, that you have changed what you do?

Do you have this urgent need to do something?

No. It speeded up writing Untold Stories.

Other than that I don't think it's made much difference.

It ought to do, in the conventional way of thinking about life-threatening illness.

There was a point when you said you thought the book would be published posthumously.

Yes. I did certainly think so.

But that made it easier to write in the sense that it loosened me up to write it.

But...I didn't want it to be published posthumously.

I'm happy to have been around when it came out.

If I ate too much food like this, it would be posthumous, really.

It isn't exactly healthy fare.

-Alan Bennett, thank you very, very much for being a guest on A Taste Of My Life.

-I've enjoyed it.

I have eaten far too much.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd.