All language subtitles for ALAN BENNETT A Day Out comment

A Day Out was the first
television film that I wrote.

This was in 1 971 , when I had
already done two stage plays

but hadn't the first idea about film.

It's a road movie of sorts.

Only the road is a succession of
back lanes and even cart tracks

that takes an Edwardian cycling club
from Halifax to Fountains Abbey in 1 91 1 .

Immensely enjoyable to do,
A Day Out wasn't easy to film.

Supposedly taking place
on an idyllic May day,

the script needed
long, languorous afternoons

and idyllic, golden evenings.

Instead, we had bitter cold days,
icy winds,

and with the trees scarcely in leaf,
I think it briefly snowed.

Fortunately, it was filmed
in black and white,

one of the last black-and-white dramas
before colour came in.

This meant that one could get away
with shots in locations

which colour would have made impossible.

Even so,
with no golden evenings on offer,

the ending had to be altered
and the scene round the war memorial

put in as a substitute.

It was a funny cast.

John Normington, James Cossins,

Paul Shane, Philip Locke
and Brian Glover,

and they were all very silly,
Philip Locke in particular.

We were in a Berni Inn in Halifax

as his chosen dish
was put in front of him

and he complained to the waitress,

''You're very skimpy with your scampi.''

A line I immediately wrote down
but have never managed to use.

Also in the film, though briefly,
was George Fenton,

who was then still an actor,
but who went on to write the music

for many of the films I did
with Stephen Frears and Innes Lloyd.

Stephen was at the start of his career
as I was of mine,

and it was the first time either of us
had worked with Innes Lloyd.

Producers don't get much credit

and the public don't always
quite know what they do.

But he was the best producer
I've ever worked with.

Sunset Across the Bay is set and
was filmed in Leeds and Morecambe,

both familiar places to me,
as Leeds was where I was brought up

and Morecambe
where we regularly went on holiday.

It's a film that in every sense
is close to home.

It concerns a working-class couple
who've dreamt of retiring to Morecambe,

as many people in Leeds did,

and uproot themselves
to begin a new life.

Only to find, as many people also did,

that they can't settle.

Morecambe, though nowadays
a bit of a joke place,

is astonishingly beautiful.

The view across the bay
to the Lake District

is surely one of the most spectacular
in Britain.

My father was a butcher

and was used to getting up at half past
six in the morning to go to work.

And on holiday in Morecambe,
he couldn't rid himself of the habit.

He used to steal out of
the boarding house first thing,

find a tea bar that opened early

and sit and have a cigarette
and read his paper,

Just as we see Harry Markham
doing in the film.

Harry hadn't started off
as a professional actor,

having worked all his life
for Courtauld's.

He'd been in amateur productions
and when he retired,

took up acting professionally.

It's a lovely, understated performance

by someone who scarcely seems
to be acting at all.

The film has one of
my favourite beginnings,

with Madge Hindle and Neil Anderton

doing an impression of
Anne Ziegler and Webster Booth

singing We'll Gather Lilacs.

It doesn't mean anything particularly.
I just like it and thought it was funny.

And it's a reminder that films and plays

are among other things, of course,
Just that. Play.

1 978 was the first time
I worked with Patricia Routledge.

It was also the first studio TV play
that I wrote

and was directed by Stephen Frears
and produced by Innes Lloyd.

Northern women, or northern ladies,

are a class of person
I've always found an unfailing delight.

''He was four hours on the table.

''Five surgeons battled to save his life.
He died three times.

''Finally, Mr Conliffe came out and asked
me whether I want him resuscitating.

''They live at Harrogate.
He has a camel-hair coat.

''She's had a nervous breakdown.

''Anyway, I said, 'Well, Mr Conliffe,
if it's all the same to you, no.

'''I don't want him fetching
backwards and forwards.

'''Besides, he wasn't like my husband.
Not at the finish.'''

It's speech as mannered and dramatic
as Restoration comedy

and social distinctions
are subtle and minute.

As Miss Prothero says,

''I've got half a dozen people who are
always begging me to pop round,

''one of them a retired chiropodist.''

It's social climbing, albeit
very much on the lower slopes.

I was once on the top of a tram
in Leeds with my auntie.

We were passing
the Wellington Road gasworks.

She laid a hand on my arm.

''Alan, that is the biggest
gasworks in England,

''and I know the manager.''

Our Winnie was written in 1 982.

One regular component
of my life as a child

was a trip to the local cemetery
with my mother and my grandmother

in order to put flowers on a grave.

It was an unmarked grave.
A mound covered in turf,

and the shape of it echoing the shape
of the long zinc baths

that still occasionally hung outside
people's back doors.

At the cemetery, I'd be sent off
to fill a jug or a milk bottle

at the distant tap and cistern,

and never quite sure where our plot was,

I'd thread my way back
through the graves

bearing the brimming vessel,
frightened that I was lost.

Then I would see
the tall figure of my grandma,

stalwart among the stone angels,
kitchen scissors in hand,

waiting to cut the grass on the grave
of her long-dead husband.

Memories of such outings
inform Our Winnie,

filmed at a cemetery
near Heywood in Lancashire

and directed by Malcolm Mowbray,

with whom I later worked
on A Private Function.

Winnie,
the middle-aged girl of the title,

is, as her mother puts it in the film,
''not right''.

Retarded, possibly, a grown-up child.

Roving the cemetery on this
particular day is an art student,

a budding photographer
on the lookout for a subject.

The stage is set for a confrontation,

with the loving protection
of Winnie's mother Cora

contrasted with
the self-serving demands of art,

as represented by
the student photographer.

It was a theme at which I had
several shots around this time.

My stage play, Enjoy, put on
a couple of years earlier in 1 980,

had been about a working-class household

seen through the unwinking eye
of a sociologist.

These days, reality programmes on TV

have made such considerations
almost a commonplace.

And though I wouldn't quite go so far
as to say Our Winnie was prophetic,

it's encouraging that
the questions at the heart of it

continue to give concern.

A Woman of No Importance
was written in 1 982,

a precursor for the later monologues
which made up the series Talking Heads.

At that time,
the form was thought to be risky,

and at first reading,
it looked like a radio play.

But I was confident that, particularly
as performed by Patricia Routledge,

it would work
and hold the attention on television.

I wrote A Woman of No Importance
thinking I might direct it myself.

I'd never directed, either for the stage
or for television,

and the possibility of having to do so

accounts for the simplicity,
not to say the crudity, of the form.

The piece is for one actress
who speaks directly to camera.

Of course, such directness and
simplicity may not be thought to work.

''Talking heads'' is a synonym
in television for boredom.

And here is just one head, not two.

And Miss Schofield is a bore.

But to have her in full close-up
relating in unremitting detail

how she borrowed
the salt in the canteen,

takes one, I hope, beyond tedium.

The first few lines of the play
are poached.

In the Festival of Britain,
which I visited as a boy,

there was a pavilion, which I suspect
I might find irritating now,

called The Lion and the Unicorn,
devoted to Englishness.

It included a console,
where by pressing a button,

one heard snatches
of typical English conversation.

These had been written by Steven Potter
and were performed by Joyce Grenfell.

One in particular concerned a disaster
that befell a middle-class lady

and began, ''I was perfectly
all right on the Monday.

''I was perfectly all right
on the Tuesday.

''I was perfectly all right
on the Wednesday.

''And I was perfectly all right
on the Thursday, until lunchtime,

''when I just had a little poached salmon

''and five minutes later,
I was rolling about the floor.''

An Englishman Abroad came out of a play
I had on in the West End in 1 977.

The play was called The Old Country
and starred Alec Guinness,

who played a Foreign Office defector
now living in exile outside Moscow.

In the course of the run of the play,

various friends and well-wishers
came round,

often with personal reminiscences
of similar spies,

figures like Guy Burgess and Kim Philby.

The most notable of these
was Coral Browne,

who at the time I didn't know,

but who told me about meeting
Guy Burgess in Moscow in 1 958,

and of the particular incidents
that make up this film.

The picture of the elegant actress
and the seedy exile

sitting in a dingy Moscow flat
through a long afternoon,

listening again and again
to Jack Buchanan singing

Who Stole My Heart Away?

seemed to me funny and sad.

But it was a few years
before I got round to writing it up.

It was only when I sent the first draft
to Coral Browne that I found

she'd kept not merely Burgess' letters
thanking her for running him errands,

but also her original notes
of his measurements

and even his cheque,
uncashed and for six pounds,

to treat her and one of her
fellow actors to lunch at Le Caprice.

It's played in the film that Burgess
longed to come back to England.

He wasn't allowed to
because it was never plain

what he could have been charged with,

and he might well have compromised
too many of his former associates

in the Foreign Office.

The real solution for Burgess
would have been to live until he was 80.

Then he would have been welcomed back
with open arms.

You only have to survive in England
for all to be forgiven.

This was more or less
what happened to Oswald Mosley,

and would have happened to Burgess,
had he lived.

He would have gone on chat shows,
been a guest on Desert Island Discs,

and dined out all over London.

In England, you only have to be able
to eat a boiled egg at 90

and they think
you deserve the Nobel Prize.

The Insurance Man
is a film about Franz Kafka,

who's famous as the author of The Trial

and of Metamorphosis, a short story
about a man who wakes up as a beetle.

Unlike his contemporary, Proust,

Kafka was not rich,
and he worked all his life

for the Workers' Accident
Insurance Company in Prague.

He was highly thought of in the firm,

where he was responsible
for the compensation

for those injured
in industrial accidents.

Until relatively recently,

Kafka's always been thought of as almost
the prototype of the neurotic artist.

Jewish, consumptive,
and the son of an overbearing father.

But latterly,
and even since the film was written,

a different view of him has emerged

so that now, he's seen also as debonair
and fashionable and keen on the movies.

Exactly the kind of young man,
in fact, that he aspired to be.

The film begins in the last days
of the Second War,

when someone
who has been helped by Kafka

at the Accident Insurance Company
many years before

now comes as an ailing, middle-aged man
to see a doctor in Prague.

This is fiction,
except that the facts are true.

In 1 91 2, Kafka did briefly manage
a factory making asbestos.

And had he escaped persecution
at the hands of the Nazis,

he might well have died as a result
of this unfortunate circumstance.

Much of the film was shot in
the old German quarter of Bradford,

and also in Liverpool,

with Kafka played by Daniel Day-Lewis,

as dedicated and single-minded
in his profession as Kafka was in his.

Dinner at Noon is a film about a hotel.

I've had unfortunate
experiences in hotels.

I was once invited to Claridge's
by the late John Huston

in order to discuss
a script he'd sent me.

The script was bulky,
and that was what he wanted to discuss,

and looked like a small parcel.

Seeing it, and I suppose, me,

the commissionaire insisted
I use the tradesman's entrance.

On another occasion, during the run of
Beyond the Fringe in New York in 1 96 3,

Dudley Moore and I took refuge
from a storm in the Hotel Pierre,

where we were spotted
by an assistant manager.

Saying that there'd been
a spate of thefts from rooms recently,

he asked us to leave.

A small argument ensued,
in the course of which

an old man and his wife stomped past,

whereupon the assistant manager
left off abusing us

in order to bow to him.
It was Stravinsky.

We were then thrown out.

Dinner at Noon is a documentary
about the Crown Hotel in Harrogate,

which Jonathan Stedall and I made
for the BBC TV series Byline

in April 1 988.

In the year of Fawlty Towers,

it might seem folly to try and say
anything more on the subject

of the roles of staff and guests
in a hotel.

And certainly it became plain
in the first two days of filming

that a respectable study of hotel life
would take much longer

than the 1 0 days we were due to shoot.

And the finished film certainly
wasn't the one we set out to make,

and I hadn't intended Dinner at Noon
to be as personal or as revealing

as it turned out to be.

Or perhaps the intention had been
at the back of my mind

and this was just
a roundabout way of getting there.

1 02 Boulevard Haussmann in Paris

was the address
of Marcel Proust's apartment

and where he wrote most of his massive
novel, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.

Writers' lives aren't easy to dramatise.

The business of writing, as distinct
from the business of cooking, say,

is not intrinsically
interesting to watch.

On film, it generally resolves itself
into a few well-worn cliches.

The paper ripped from the typewriter,

screwed up and thrown into
the wastepaper basket.

The growing number of
cigarette ends in the ashtray.

And, of course, the drink.

In Proust's case,
the cliches don't apply.

He wrote by hand, for a start,

didn't smoke, he was asthmatic,
and scarcely drank.

But in the second part
of his life, certainly,

the writing of his novel
dictated every aspect

of what was an extraordinary life.

He wrote through the night,
slept during the day,

his room lined with cork
to insulate it against noise.

Though this was during the First War
and the Germans not far away,

he would use the Ritz in Paris
as a takeaway,

and was rich enough
to indulge his every whim.

For much of his life,

he was devotedly looked after
by a housekeeper, Celeste Albaret,

who in her way
was as eccentric as he was,

and herself figures in the novel.

Alan Bates, who plays Proust,
was one of my closest friends.

A delightful man, and though
in the end honours came his way,

a much underrated actor.

I worked with him on this film
and An Englishman Abroad,

and both are in memory borne along
on gales of laughter.

A Question of Attribution
is a film about Sir Anthony Blunt,

the keeper of the Queen's pictures.

When he was exposed
as a Soviet spy in 1 979,

on spec, I made some notes
of the kind of conversation

he and the Queen might have had

as he was hanging a picture
in Buckingham Palace.

This later became the heart of the play

I wrote for the National Theatre
in 1 988.

The painting at the centre of the play

is actually a picture
in the Royal Collection,

a triple portrait attributed to Titian.

Originally, the painting had included
only two figures.

Cleaning revealed a third figure.

An x-ray revealed a fourth figure.

And when the painting was revolved,
there was the shadow of a fifth figure.

The analogy with the Cambridge spies
seemed obvious.

Say the two original figures
stand in for the first defectors,

Burgess and Maclean,

and the third figure the next defector,
Kim Philby,

the fourth figure is Blunt,

and the fifth figure is...
Well, who knows?

It was this painting
and related art historical matters

which provided the framework
of the play,

though the deeply ambiguous conversation
the Queen has with Blunt

is at its heart.

Blunt himself remains
a fascinating figure.

Hated by some of his colleagues,
adored by others.

I never met or even saw him,
but as with Guy Burgess,

I feel more kindly towards him
because he made such good jokes.

He was bisexual.

And at a party
at the Courtauld Institute,

of which he was the director,

a colleague saw him locked in the arms
of one of his female students.

Later on in the evening,

the same colleague saw him
still on the same sofa,

but this time
with one of his male students.

''Oh, Anthony,'' said the colleague,
''you're so fickle.''

''I know,'' said Blunt. ''But remember,
many a fickle makes a fuckle.''

Portrait or Bust is a documentary
about Leeds Art Gallery

which I made with Jonathan Stedall
in 1 993.

Although these are the pictures I like,

I'm not sure I've much of consequence
to say about the actual paintings.

But what I did in the film
was advertise my own ignorance

in the hope that
it would encourage people

with similar feelings of inadequacy
where art is concerned

to come into the gallery nevertheless.

And once they're in the gallery,
they shouldn't feel intimidated.

Some of the pictures in Leeds
I've known since I was a child.

They're often not masterpieces
but just old friends,

and I no longer have to ask myself
what it is I like about them.

I know them, and that's enough.

Still, it would do no harm

to have in the entrance hall
of all art galleries a large sign.

''Remember, you do not
have to like everything.''