All language subtitles for An Englishman Abroad commentary

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 Cuinness,

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 Cuy 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
Cuy 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.