All language subtitles for A Day Out interview of Alan Bennett

(BELL TOLLING)

I wasn't asked to write A Day Out.
I never have worked a commission anyway.

I've always written things on spec,

and I think I'd done two plays

on the stage at that time.

And then I thought
I'd have a go at writing

a film or television film,

without having any idea
how it was done, really,

and there wasn't really anybody
you could ask.

Now, I began by writing down
scraps of dialogue.

I had no idea of the characters,

but I just wrote down
scraps of dialogue.

A lot of it,
stuff I remembered from childhood,

and stuff that my mother
and my father used to say.

And then, I looked at what I'd got

and started to try and make
characters out of it.

And then I had this notion of...
I know what it was...

I saw a photograph of
what was obviously a cycling club,

and thought that would be
a good vehicle, I mean, really.

And so I had this notion
of sending a cycling club on an outing

to Fountains Abbey,
from Halifax or Hebden Bridge,

Just before the First War.

But it wasn't very dramatic,

and the BBC didn't think
it was very dramatic, because we...

Stephen Frears...
I showed it to Stephen Frears

and he showed it to Innes Lloyd.

And Innes Lloyd then sent it along
to the script department of the BBC.

And it came back with a note saying,

''We don't like this,
it doesn't go anywhere.''

And Innes Lloyd, who was a wonderful
man and a wonderful producer,

he wrote a note back saying,

''It goes to Fountains Abbey and back,
and that's quite far enough for me.''

And then commissioned it.
So we owed it to him.

I knew Stephen Frears socially,

and he maybe had suggested
I write something,

I don't know, I can't remember.

But he didn't...
I wrote it out and showed it to him,

and he then gave it to Innes Lloyd.

I mean, I didn't work
with him on it, I...

I just wrote it off, you know,
on spec, really. And...

He'd never made a television film
before this time,

so it was a first for him as well.

Innes Lloyd was
an old-fashioned BBC producer.

And old-fashioned in this sense,
that he...

He didn't seem like a BBC producer,
for a start. He seemed like...

Like one of those
rather raffish officers

in the desert army in the Second War
who wore cravats,

and who were rather cavalier
about their uniform.

He was very...
Debonair isn't quite the word,

but he certainly was
a rather romantic figure.

And what was wonderful about him

was that he trusted you entirely.

He, I think, had a notion of the...

The superiority or the sanctity
of the written word.

And that was your job
and he was going to support you.

And I never recall ever having to
censor my scripts or to...

And he never told me about
how many viewers we'd had.

All the stock things which
producers are supposed to care about,

he didn't care about at all.

And he produced everything I did
at the BBC, until...

The last one was
A Question of Attribution, which...

He was quite plainly dying
when we were doing that.

And that was in 1 991 .

And I've not really worked
very much with BBC since.

And it's because he was just

such a wonderful umbrella
within a large organisation.

You need somebody like that.

He knew exactly whom to approach,
he didn't...

There wasn't... You didn't have to
go through all the formalities.

If he liked it,
he would see that it got made.

And they don't work like that now.

I worked with Patricia Routledge
I suppose about half a dozen times.

The first time I saw her
was on the stage of Wyndham's,

I think, in 1 964,

when she was in a play by...
I think it was Roger Milner,

called How's the World Treating You?

And what was good about her
was that she...

She absolutely got everything
out of a line.

She never threw a line away,
she always got something out of it.

And reading Orton's diaries
subsequently,

he saw her and said exactly the same,

and indeed used her in some
television plays that he wrote.

So, you know that she absolutely

makes every word count.
That's one thing about her.

The other thing is that
her timing is very, very good,

and very...

It's hard to explain, but it's very...

Oh, I mean...

Comedy is always dependent
on timing, but...

Particularly if you're doing,
in her case, monologues.

She can split a second in the sense
that she can deliver the line,

and in delivering, get a glance
into the camera, which...

It's... I can't describe
how she does it,

but I know she can do it
and nobody else...

There may be better actresses
than she is,

but there's nobody I've seen
who is better at doing that and doing...

Being so specific and so...

Having the audience
and yet being in the part.

And she's wonderful at that.

Normally, i.e. provided Miss Hayman

isn't paying us one of her state visits,

come half past twelve and I'm ready
to down tools and call it a morning.

I put on a lick of paint, slip over
and spend a penny in Costing.

I should technically use the one
in Records,

but I've told them that lavatory seat
is a death-trap.

And I'm not ringing up again.

''Try a bit of Sellotape.''
What are they paid for?

I'll then route out
Miss Brunskill from 402

and we'll meander gently over
for our midday meal.

But you just have to hit it right,

Because give it another five minutes
and believe me,

that canteen is dog eat dog.

I wrote A Woman of No Importance
for Patricia Routledge.

She won't thank me for remembering this,

but when she read it, she said,
''Oh, it's a radio play.''

And she took some convincing,

but once she was convinced,
she did it superbly.

And vindicated my belief

that you could actually have
one head on the screen,

and that was riveting.

I don't see it
as particularly a bleak play.

Though I say it myself,
it's very funny at the start.

And there are,
even right until she dies,

there are funny moments.

But...

I just felt it was, I hope,
it was honest, that's all.

And also, I thought it was...

It was slightly based on my aunties,
as some of my plays are.

And her...

I suppose the word is ''solipsistic.''

Her total conviction that
she is the centre of the world.

Even to the extent that the fly,

which is in the room as she's dying,

somehow the fly is an indication that...

The fly has come to see her
rather than anybody else,

is an indication
of her superiority, really.

That seemed to me to be true.

I think in all the films that we made,

I was there, and used to go there...

I don't think I attained the status
of having a car sent for me

until much later on.

So I used to turn up.

And I used to be there
for various reasons.

One, I used to like it, and it was
a break from having to sit at my desk.

Another reason was that,

very often,
the films are set in the north,

and at that time, I don't know,

for some reason it's got easier,
I think,

but at that time, actors were less adept

at doing a northern accent
than they are now.

Actors are much better mimics now
than they used to be, for some reason.

So I often used to be there
slightly as a dialogue coach, really.

And I remember on A Day Out,

Paul Shane, as one of the cyclists,
had to get off his bike

as they got to Fountains Abbey
overlooking this idyllic view,

and he had to say, ''Eh, my bum is numb.''

And he persisted in saying,
''Eh, my bum's numb.''

(LAUGHING) And I couldn't make him see
that there was any difference between

these two ways of saying the line.

It made me realise that it's hopeless to
give an actor an inflection like that.

You just can't do it.

But that was what I was there for,
to actually...

'Cause Stephen, he wasn't from the north
and so he wasn't always sure

how the rhythm of the line should be.

So that was another reason.

And as I say, I used to...

I like the company of actors,
they make me laugh.

I mean, they...

I mean... And also, it was quite camp,
in the way actors are camp.

I remember, again, on A Day Out,
Philip Locke, who...

He was quite funny in the sense
that he was slightly odd in the eye.

And the actors hadn't woken up to this
until they saw the first rushes.

And they saw that if ever he was
in the background of a scene,

he was the one you watched
'cause he looked slightly peculiar.

(LAUGHING) And so they
learned how to avoid

being upstaged by him
and his odd in the eye-ness.

But I remember once, at Fountains,

he had to do a scene
in which he's picking flowers.

And we did the scene
and he picks the flowers,

and at the end of the scene,
when we'd cut,

he then went over to
John Normington and said,

''I brought you some flowers.
I hear your scene just died.''

And it's kind of silliness like that,
I like.

The original ending of A Day Out
wasn't at the war memorial

as it is in the finished version.

It was a series of...

Probably less interesting
in a way, less...

A series of shots of...

Idyllic sunset shots, really,
of them going home along the road

we'd seen them coming to the Abbey on,

in a very lyrical way,
and with plenty of music.

But the weather made that
absolutely impossible. So...

So then I had to write the scene
at the war memorial.

I never feel quite that it works,
in the sense that...

If you're going to age characters,

in a way, it's better to see them as...

the older age first.

You've got used to what they look like
in the film as young men.

And then suddenly you see them,

the survivors, anyway, of the First War,
are much older, and it just works.

But it's one of those things
where you think,

''Oh, we could do that again.''

I was writing about the First War
in the film.

I mean, throughout, as it were.

I can't remember now
whether it's in the film, but there's...

I wrote a shot in which,

in the middle of this idyll, as it were,
when they're in the Abbey,

there's distant thunder.

And I think somebody is actually
in one of the Abbey drains,

but it could be a trench.

And as it were, it's a prefiguring
of what's going to happen.

So I was...
I did know that it was about that.

And it does give a lot of the dialogue
an ironic edge to it,

the fact that they are so hopeful
and that the future looks so bright.

Dinner at Noon
came out of my reading a...

The work of an American sociologist
called Erving Goffman.

He wrote a book called

The Presentation of Self
in Everyday Life.

He wrote many books.

And I think he's now
rather discredited as a sociologist.

But I've always found
his work fascinating.

And he had done his fieldwork in a hotel

on the island of Yell in the Hebrides,
I think,

or the Orkneys, somewhere in Scotland.

And his thesis had been about

the difference in the hotel between

the behaviour behind
the green and beige door

that closed off the public parts
of the hotel from the private parts,

and the way people's behaviour altered

when they moved
from one area into the other.

And I found this fascinating. And so...

I think that was the impulse to go
to the Crown Hotel in Harrogate,

to see whether one could
come across anything like this.

Well, of course, we didn't.

And it's not surprising, 'cause I think
Goffman lived for a year in this hotel,

and worked in the kitchen, so he was
in a rather different position.

But that's how it started off.

But then finding it didn't work,
and finding that

we weren't really getting anything,
any interesting material,

I then sat down and wrote out

accounts of the stuff
I remembered from my childhood.

Not particularly about hotels,
but about cafes,

and about eating in public
with my parents.

And how my parents
were always intimidated

by hotels and boarding houses,
and so on.

And I think that struck a chord
with people.

As well as some of the overheard
conversations are very good,

the people talking in low voices,
just as my parents would have talked.

'Cause they were...

They would never raise their voices
in a cafe,

or in a place where they were
likely to be overheard.

And so I think
that struck a chord with people.

I think some of Portrait or Bust
is to with teaching,

but the thing I remember about that
was that it was...

It was written...

I think I'd just been made a trustee
of the National Gallery,

which mystified me at the time.

I said to Neil MacGregor,
''Why have you asked me to do it?''

(CHUCKLES) He said, ''Oh, I think
you're the man in the street.''

And anyway, I think
it was made at that time.

And it's full of the things which
I very firmly believed, and believe now.

Particularly about access to art,

and about free art galleries.

Because there was a time in the '90s

when there was a very strong move
to charge for galleries,

and it was a battle
that was being fought.

So I think it was to do with that.

So I was quite passionate
about that side of it.

I also... There's a small child
in Portrait or Bust

who's standing on his tiptoes
looking at a Barbara Hepworth sculpture.

And he obviously likes it,
this small child.

And I think I saw him as me, really,

and felt that
that was what he was about,

what I'd been like as a child.
And that...

And I think this is how
the documentary ends, that...

I say that I had an easier time of it
than he's going to have,

and it's not fair. And I still...
I do believe that very strongly.

And it links in
with all the other things which...

I think people just think I'm a boring,
old socialist, that's what I am.

But, you know, I don't believe
in public school education,

and believe in free education.

And all those things which

the English tend to gloss over
and live with, really.

# Who stole my heart away

# Who makes me dream all day

# Dreams I know can never be true

# Seems as though... #

ALAN BENNETT:
I'm not interested in spying.

I'm interested in spies
as people, I think.

But the actual spying business itself,

I mean, other people have done it
so well anyway,

but I'm not interested in that.

I am interested in how
they came to do what they did.

And how they could,

as Burgess, in An Englishman Abroad,
demonstrated,

how they could still regard themselves
as an Englishman abroad.

And it...

It was quite a...

Although it's, in a sense,
a historical play,

the events all happened in the past.

That question was very much to the fore
in the '80s when they were written.

When...

Treason was somehow made
the crime of crimes.

And treason didn't necessarily,
under Mrs Thatcher,

necessarily imply
betraying information to...

You know, miners were
practically treasonable,

the way she sold the State.

So, I think it was to do with that.

But it's also to do with

finding myself not...

Not shocked by what they did.

I mean, it seemed to me
that the Cambridge spies,

Philby possibly excepted,

but Blunt and Burgess were...

Became members of the Communist Party
and became Soviet spies

when they were very young men.

But once they had become Soviet spies,
there was no turning back.

They were saddled with that decision
for the rest of their lives.

And yet you could see that

everything about Burgess was English,
and inclined himself...

All his enthusiasms and all his
social attitudes were English.

And yet it was this wrong move
when he was in his 20s

which determined the rest of his life.

Coral played herself.

To begin with, I think, 'cause we
daren't imagine anybody else doing it.

I mean, she was
such a formidable personality.

If we'd suggested anybody,

(LAUGHS) she would have
torn them to bits.

But I remember she...

Because she was married to Vincent Price
and lived in Hollywood.

And I was on the phone to her,

and when we were talking about
the letters Burgess had written to her,

and I heard about the whole thing.

And she said,

''Who do you think should play me?''

And I heard myself saying,

(LAUGHING)
''Well, would you like to do it?''

I don't think it was in my gift, anyway,
but I didn't dare say anything else.

And, of course, it was wonderful,
'cause she carried it off.

And she'd had umpteen facelifts,

but she still was immensely glamorous.

And she was glamorous in a way
that people aren't glamorous now.

When she...

She wore a wonderful... This mink
or whatever it was, a fur coat.

But it was a most wonderful garment.

And when she went to get this coat,
at Nathan's, I think,

all the dressers

and the people from
the sewing department and all,

they all came to watch her try it on.

It was an extraordinary scene.

Alan Bates was...

When he was cast in
An Englishman Abroad, to my shame,

he was John Schlesinger's casting,
I didn't think he could do it,

'cause, I said, ''He's not upper-class
and it will show.''

And it didn't show.

And John Schlesinger said,
quite rightly,

''Oh, no, you should cast to the actor,
not the class.''

And he was quite right.

I can't tell any of the stories
I know about Alan

'cause they're so improper.

But he would always have you
in hoots of laughter.

And he had such a... I mean, an active,
but in many ways disastrous sex life,

that there was always ample material

to convulse you.

And I was quite happy for him to tell me
the same stories time and time again.

I was just as helpless when he told me.

When Coral started filming,
she'd already had one bout of cancer.

And it recurred
in the course of the film.

So she was...

She wasn't actually weakened,
I don't think, except by anxiety.

But the good elements, more than good,
the sort of brave thing about her,

she didn't in any way suggest
that she was being brave.

She didn't act the part.

She just shrugged it off.

And John Schlesinger was bothered that

in some of the scenes it might show
in her face that she was a bit haggard.

I don't think it does, but...

But she lived anyway
for quite a while after that.

We shot An Englishman Abroad in Dundee,

some of it in Glasgow.

(CHUCKLES) But none of it
did we leave these shores for.

And it's interesting, really,

it educates the eye
when you're looking for locations.

And the reason why Glasgow was chosen,

there is a long row of
early 1 9th-century houses

which have been painted in such a way

that they look slightly like
St Petersburg.

They certainly don't look English.

And then there was a...

I think, is it called the Craig Hall?

There's a concert hall in Dundee

which was built in the '20s or '30s,

and that didn't look English.

And also, happily, in Dundee,

there was a community of Ukrainians

who'd come over to work
in the jute factories.

And so they were used as extras.

But it was...

The usual thing at that time,
if you wanted to suggest Russia,

was to film in Helsinki.

But the BBC couldn't afford
to send us to Helsinki, so...

A Question of Attribution
was a play before it was a film.

And it really arose out of my interest
in art history, really.

And I'd...

The time that Blunt was exposed
as a Soviet spy,

I'd made these notes on a possible
conversation with the Queen,

which was actually
the heart of the play.

And then I thought
I'd better see whether...

If I was ever going to do
anything about this,

whether there was a painting
in the Royal Collection

they could be discussing.

And then found this picture,
not a great picture by any means,

which had these two figures in it,

and then if you X-rayed it,

if you cleaned it,
there was a third figure.

And if you X-rayed it, a fourth figure.

Then if you turned it around,
there was a fifth figure.

And I found this one Saturday afternoon

in an old copy of
The Burlington Magazine

in the London Library.

The London library on a Saturday
afternoon is not an exciting place,

and there's very, very few people there.

And it seemed to me, it's very seldom
this happens to you when you're writing,

it seemed such a gift,
the plot, from that.

This was such an obvious metaphor
for all the spies

that I thought, ''Well, somebody else
must surely spot this.''

At which point, somebody started
to come up the stairs.

(LAUGHING) And I thought,
''Oh, this is another playwright.''

And I did seriously think
somebody else was on to it.

But anyway, fortunately, they weren't.

So, that's how I came to write the play.

And when we...

When we made the film,
John Schlesinger made the film,

there was a...

Since there was a conversation
with the Queen,

the corgis had to figure.
And my heart sank

when I heard the corgis
were going to figure in this scene,

because my experience, there's always...

When there is an animal on a film,
there's always an animal handler.

And it's a misnomer.

They very seldom can handle the animals
they claim to know intimately.

And so I thought, ''Well, this is going
to lengthen the whole business

''if we have this animal handler.''

But for some reason,
these corgis behaved wonderfully.

And the Queen's entrance is preceded

by the corgis coming in
and scampering around.

And they did it perfectly.

Then Prunella Scales
came in as the Queen,

and it was absolutely just spot on.

I think I was interested in Kafka,
because...

I'd started reading him,

and felt that he'd been misconceived.

It seemed to me... I read The Trial,

and I think all I knew
about the trial before that was

I'd seen the Anthony Perkins film,
which is a very...

stock, rather cliched view of Kafka.
Kafka as a cog in...

K, as he is in the book,
as a cog in a wheel

and a faceless man, and so on.

But if you read The Trial, you'll find
it's much more like Alice in Wonderland

than it is like
a parable of bureaucracy.

And I suppose I felt I wanted
to tell people this, in a way.

And the more I read about Kafka,

the more effective as a person
he seemed to be.

He was, at that time,

presented as being
a hopeless neurotic, really.

And it was quite plain that he wasn't.

He was highly thought of
in this firm in Prague.

And did a great deal of good in his job.

I mean, quite apart
from his literary efforts.

And so, I suppose
it was to do with that, really.

The Insurance Man begins with
a flashback from Prague in 1 944,

when the city is being
bombarded or besieged

and the war is going on.

And a man, a sick man,
comes to see a doctor.

And the doctor tells him, I think he...

He asks him whether he's ever worked
in an asbestos factory.

And he said, yes, he did,
when he was a young man.

And so, then you go back
to the asbestos factory

that Kafka briefly managed.

I think I wanted to do it
that way around,

because if you'd done it
the other way around,

I don't know, it would seem tagged on,
it would seem less believable.

But since it was all... It was true that
that was exactly what had happened.

I mean, Kafka

is somehow, in a way that
he himself would have understood,

is somehow stalked by death.

He, physically, being so frail,

and then dying from...

He died of TB of the larynx.

And then he died. And then, of course...

the persecution of the Jews
would have seen him off,

'cause he would have been
gone to Auschwitz or wherever.

And then, if he hadn't,

if he went to America
as his doctor actually did go to...

His doctor was still practising
on Fifth Avenue in the '60s, I think.

If he'd gone to New York,

then, having managed this
asbestos factory for a few months,

that would have caught up with him
and he would have died anyway.

And it's as if, in a way, as I say,
he would understand it,

he couldn't escape death.

And that seemed to me, I don't know,
Just memorable, really.

Proust was a different thing.
It was just his...

His whole way of life fascinated me.

The fact that his whole life was geared
towards art, and that he

slept all through the night and...

Slept all through the day
and wrote during the night.

And also, I read a bit about

an episode which wasn't
generally known about him.

Inviting a string quartet
back to his apartment

and making them play for him,
playing particular pieces of music.

And then feeding them with food
which were takeaways from the Ritz.

And that seemed to me...

And this was in the middle
of the First War.

And that seemed to me
a very romantic episode.

I think if...

It's like An Englishman Abroad.
If there's a plot, give it to me.

I'm very happy to write the piece,
I'm so bad at plots.

I'm just happy when
somebody's had an interesting life

and you can write something about it.

I think I haven't written for television
very much since 1 990,

really, since Innes Lloyd died.
And it's because...

Although the late Mark Shivas,

he was the producer for the
second series of Talking Heads.

He...

And he helped produce
A Private Function.

Nevertheless, I've never found anybody

to reproduce the relationship
I had with Innes.

And I think that's partly...

Also, I've been very happy
at the National Theatre.

I mean, they...

I always say, it's not like work.
I like going there.

It's like... It's play, you know,
and I think that's what I like.

It's going out to play.

I think I don't think about

the disparate audiences of theatre
and television in the sense that

obviously you can reach
far more people on television

than you'd ever do in the theatre.

Partly because I've got an old-fashioned
attachment to the written word.

It seems if you've got it written down,

somebody will do it, either in the
theatre or on television or whatever.

But the important thing
is to get it down, really.

I think I was trying
to find significance in the...

In ordinary life, because...

Really, that was all
that was available to me.

(LAUGHS) I mean,
writers don't lead interesting lives,

or very few writers do,
and I certainly haven't.

I mean, I find it a very satisfying
and a very lucky life,

but it can only be said to be
venturesome, really.

But...

It seemed to me there's plenty
going on to write about.

And I still find that.
Touch wood, I don't know.

But it's not... It wasn't a...

It wasn't a kind of determination

to look at one strand of...
Like George Gissing or something,

to look at a certain strand of life.
I... That was just...

And also, if you're a playwright,

very often the dialogue dictates
what you're interested in.

If you hear the voices in your head
and can transcribe them,

then you follow the voices.

And the voices in my case
were just ordinary voices,

and so that's probably
where it comes from.