Writing Home

by Alan Bennett

  25 May, Halifax. The last day of filming. I drive to Halifax and shop in the covered market. Cheese cut from the block, bacon from the roll, flowers and good bread, all served with interest and friendliness and with none of the aggression you get in London street markets with all their Cockney cockiness and Bow Bells rubbish.

  We film the last scene at the memorial in Ackroyden Square, where we started four weeks ago. Here, where the club forgathered at the start of the day out in 1911, the survivors meet at an Armistice Day service in 1919. It’s an afterthought on my part, and doesn’t quite work in the film because of that. The filming ends with the whole unit and a few interested housewives standing on a street corner in the rain, singing ‘O Valiant Hearts’ for a wild track of the sound. And still bitterly cold.

  The Writer in Disguise

  These five television plays were part of a series of six produced for London Weekend Television in 1978–9. Reading them now, five years after they were produced and six years after they were written, I can see that three of them (Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Afternoon Off and One Fine Day) are not dissimilar and that Hopkins, the polytechnic lecturer, Lee, the Chinese waiter, and Phillips, the estate agent, share the same character, indeed are the same character. Passive, dejected, at odds with themselves, they are that old friend, the Writer in Disguise. A doleful presence, whatever his get-up, he slips apologetically in and out of scenes being heartfelt, while the rest of the cast, who are invariably more fun (and more fun to write, too), get on with the business of living. They are not heartfelt at all; one doesn’t have to be fair to them, nor are they around long enough to elicit understanding. And, unlike the sorry hero, they talk. But it’s hard to find words to put into the mouth of the central character when ‘Gr-rr-rr’ or ‘Oh dear’ seems to say it all. Lee, the Chinese waiter, who scarcely speaks but only smiles, is the ineffectual hero taken to a logical conclusion and the natural condition of all three is what Lee ends up doing – namely, lying in his underpants staring at the ceiling.

  What distinguishes a television play from a stage play I find hard to say. It’s plain that of these plays only The Old Crowd could conceivably have been presented on the stage because it’s the only one not set in a variety of locations, besides being written in a deliberately theatrical way. The empty house in The Old Crowd is a kind of stage, and whereas the other plays are in varying degrees naturalistic The Old Crowd is not naturalistic at all (which may explain why it annoyed so many viewers and was generally disliked). The difference between writing for stage and for television is almost an optical one. Language on the stage has to be slightly larger than life because it is being heard in a much larger space. Plot counts for less on the television screen because one is seeing the characters at closer quarters than in the theatre. The shape and plot of a stage play count for more in consequence of the distance between the audience and the action. A theatre audience has a perspective on a play as a television audience does not. The audience in a theatre is an entity as a television audience is not. On television the playwright is conversing. In the theatre he is (even when conversing) addressing a meeting. The stage aspires to the condition of art as television seldom does (which is not to say that it shouldn’t). The most that can be said for these plays in that respect is that occasionally they stray into literature.

  Of the five scripts printed here three were shot wholly on film (Afternoon Off, One Fine Day and All Day on the Sands); one in the studio wholly on tape (The Old Crowd), with the other (Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf) a mixture of both. If I prefer working on film to working in the studio it is for entirely frivolous reasons. Being on location with a unit, like being on tour with a play, concentrates the experience; one is beleaguered, often enjoyably so, and for a short while the film becomes the framework of one’s life. I am more gregarious than I like to think and to be working on a film with congenial people in an unfamiliar place seems to me the best sort of holiday. In the studio this camaraderie and shared concern is more circumscribed. There are homes to go to, lives to be lived and the recording process is altogether more routine. For the studio staff it may be a play for today, but tomorrow it’s The South Bank Show and the day after Game for a Laugh. It’s work in a way that filming on location, however arduous, never quite is.

  Not that it is often arduous. To an onlooker, which for much of the time I am, it’s like war: long periods of boredom punctuated by bouts of frenzied activity. The scene in Tony Richardson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade in which Lord Raglan and his party view the charge from a nearby hilltop is (perhaps deliberately) very like watching the making of a film. The terminology of film (cut, shoot, action, reload) is the terminology of battle and it is a battle in which the director is the general and the actors are infantry, never told what is happening, left hanging about for hours at a time, then suddenly, because ‘the light is right’, on standby, ready to go. Troops in the trenches used to stand to when the light was right; actors share their pessimism and the sense that, though seldom consulted, they are the ones who must get up and do it. The director is staff; he is behind the gun. The actors face it. And it isn’t simply a metaphor. There is a lot of playing soldiers about it. Forget film – there would be many directors just as happy conducting a small war.

  How well these scripts read I’m not sure. Strictly speaking there is no such thing as a good script, only a good film, a good play. But though a script is only a partial document, a guide to what ends up on the screen, I’m old-fashioned enough to have more faith in the permanence of print than of any other medium: tapes can be wiped, films lost. Television has been going full blast now for more than thirty years without the BBC or ITV working out a foolproof archive system. Besides, these plays went out once only and on a Saturday night opposite Match of the Day, which is virtually a recipe for oblivion, so I’m happy to see them rescued and printed.

  I owe a good deal to Stephen Frears, who produced all five plays and directed three of them, to Lindsay Anderson and Giles Foster who directed the others, and also to George Fenton who scored them all. Writing incidental music for films is a thankless task precisely because most of the time it has to be incidental. But occasionally it’s crucial and then the writer or the director as like as not get the credit for the effect of scenes the composer has brought off or (more likely) has had to rescue: the entry of each character in The Old Crowd on the page seems quite flat and would have done so in the film without the lilting tune, both sad and silly, that comes in with them. Lindsay Anderson has written his own account of directing The Old Crowd and the extracts from my diary that follow give some flavour of what working on that and the other plays was like.

  11 January 1978, London (The Old Crowd). Lindsay Anderson lives in a flat in one of the redbrick turn-of-the-century blocks behind John Barnes in Swiss Cottage. With its solid turreted houses, backing on gardens, Canfield, Compayne, Aberdare, Broadhurst, it’s the haunt of refugees and Jewish old ladies, and perhaps (Lindsay would strike out that ‘perhaps’) the most European bit of London.

  Lindsay comes to the door in a plastic apron in the middle of preparing leeks or parsnips. He makes me some coffee, then we sit at the kitchen table and work on the script. He looks at me enquiringly, then puts a straight line through half a page. ‘Boring, don’t you think? Too tentative.’ He invariably crosses out all my ‘possiblys’ and ‘perhapses’. To be epic is, if nothing else, to be positive. He agreed to do the The Old Crowd in the first place because he detected ‘epic’ qualities in it. I think this is to do with the house being completely bare and with George and Betty, the middle-class couple, not letting anything interfere with their intention to have a party. Lindsay wants the script to be more epic, but I am still not sure what epic means. ‘The doors all open downstairs when everybody has gone. That is epic’ I think it means things do not have to be explained, but am not sure of the difference between this and mystification. I don’t say this. Sometimes I resent seeing a day’s work crossed out at a stroke (
except that I can generally salvage it for something else). It is like having one’s homework marked, and there is a lot of the schoolmaster about Lindsay, and some of wanting to please the teacher about me. Every few minutes work stops and gossip takes over. ‘You didn’t like that?’ (Incredulously, mouth set in a long firm line.) The eyes close in despair and he shakes his head. ‘And I can’t stand him. So English.’ ‘English’ is invariably a word of abuse, representing smallness of mind, intimacy, gossip, charm. All the things Auden fled from. Yet Lindsay is himself very English. Sometimes he routs out his scrapbook to illustrate a point. There is a picture of the Archbishop of Canterbury gingerly touching the bone threaded through the nose of some Zulu warrior. Peter Hall’s Sanderson advert. Many telephone calls. Alan Bates. William Douglas-Home. Michael Medwin. Actors wanting advice about their lives (which he gives) accompanied by an elaborate pantomime of despair for my benefit.

  The flat is airy and comfortable. A corridor lined with photographs, but not, as in my house, picked up at junk shops. His own school. His own life. Lindsay as a child in India astride an enormous gun. Pre-war gym displays at Cheltenham College. Awards for films and for commercials. A pinboard on which is a picture of Brecht, a photo of the cast of What the Butler Saw. Lindsay directing Ralph Richardson. A group photo of some critics. ‘Look at them, Alan. I mean, is it surprising?’ He shakes his head. ‘England.’ In the lavatory a jokey warning notice. (He is not afraid of conforming to type even when the type is a bit of a joke.) He has no pretensions to taste and would presumably despise the word. Dozens of bottles of slivovitz and vodka in the kitchen, souvenirs of visits to Eastern Europe. Odd bits of peasant art. A poster of a Polish film festival. Solid, plumpish, with his long nose and wide mouth, Lindsay looks quite Polish himself. Coffee over he starts preparing my lunch. He is a hospitable man, though the odd thing is he prepares my lunch separately from his and serves it first, though his consists of the same ingredients.

  We have finished the script now. He has suggested only small sections of dialogue, but dealt more positively with the characters than I would dare to: had Totty, the uninvited guest, die in the drawing room; sent the waiters mysteriously into the night. At the moment we are hung up on the music. I wanted the entertainers who come to the house to sing, very formally, the song from High Noon (‘Do not forsake me, Ο my darling’). Lindsay wants something much straighter, more ‘cultural’.

  At another point he wants all the guests to sing a song round the body of Totty, who collapses and dies in the middle of a slide show. He suggests ‘The Sun Shines Bright’ from the John Ford film, a song that has happy associations for him. It has none for me. Or not quite none. It brings back a terrible film about Stephen Foster that I saw as a child at the Crown down Tong Road in Leeds. We joke about these songs and no decision is reached, except that Lindsay goes round softly crooning ‘The Sun Shines Bright’ in the hope I will get to like it.

  He doesn’t understand jokes. Or why people make them. ‘No, I don’t like jokes,’ he admits. ‘Wisecracks, yes. Jokes, no. Have you heard there’s a new punk rock group. They perform inBrady and Hindley masks and call themselves “The Moors Murderers”. That’s why we can’t have satire in England.’

  ‘Never mind,’ he says as I go. ‘This will just be thought of as a small hiccup in your career.’

  I’m enjoying it.

  11 February, London (The Old Crowd). A run-through of The Old Crowd in the Territorial Army Drill Hall in Handel Street, Bloomsbury. Whereas I had thought it bitty and formless and without point or humour I see now much of it works, particularly when the actors have the courage to declaim the lines and not invest them with too much heart or meaning. John Moffatt is particularly good and Jill Bennett very stylish. The play’s greatest virtue is that it does not seem like mine.

  Rachel Roberts and Jill Bennett go off to lunch together to compare notes on their various husbands. They are like old-fashioned stars, both in expensive fur coats, and when together sly and mischievous and in league against men.

  Lindsay has no false pride. He will consider suggestions from anybody. ‘Grateful for them. I mean, come on. One has few enough ideas of one’s own.’ He is often accused of cribbing from Buñuel, but has actually seen very few Buñuel films. People have told him about them, though. ‘That gives you a much more vivid picture. I don’t think I want to see them in case I’m disappointed.’ He believes in the creative power of mischief. At one point I suggest that Jill Bennett should say a line in a different way. ‘Oh yes. Tell her that. I’ve just told her to do the opposite. Now she won’t know what to do.’ He turns the rehearsals into school. He is the schoolmaster by turns praising, sarcastic or self-revealing. The actors vie with each other to please him. He makes them children again so they do not mind being childish and showing their uncertainty. Stood in his cap and old windcheater he listens to them with a long-suffering air, wide mouth set in a slightly mocking smile. ‘Aren’t they stupid? Don’t you just want to shoot them all? I do. I just want to machine-gun them all.’ He suddenly shouts at them. ‘Fucking actors.’

  ‘Oh, don’t start that,’ Jill Bennett shouts back.

  ‘Fucking actors!’

  22 February, London (The Old Crowd). Lindsay says he doesn’t like jokes but it’s not true. He’s not keen on wordplay or the nuances of class as reflected in dialogue but some of the nicest jokes in the script are his.

  As Frank Grimes, the disreputable young butler, relieves Jill Bennett of her fur coat, his hand rests momentarily on her breast. She doesn’t turn a hair but just murmurs, ‘Oh, thank you very much.’

  The party stand round the body of Totty. ‘I’ve never seen anybody dead before,’ says Sue brightly. ‘Have you?’

  ‘Only at school,’ says Peter. A remark that is funny, shocking but truthful. School is exactly where he might have seen someone dead. And again it’s Lindsay’s line and Lindsay’s life.

  The only disagreement we have had has been about publicity. Lindsay believes in talking to the press at length about what he does, preparing the public for it. I’ve always thought that a recipe for disaster. He wins and there’s a good deal in the papers. Though no one has had a chance to read the play and though it hasn’t even been shot yet, he is already quite combative about it.

  28 February, Hartlepool (Afternoon Off). Stephen Frears shows me Seaton Carew, the seedy holiday resort near Hartlepool he thinks he may use for Afternoon Off. A green art-deco marina, a stretch of prom, then cranes, cooling towers and a skyline filled with factories and derricks. On the shore thin Lowry figures fill sacks with sea-coal and wheel them dripping across the prom to the gates of the power station where they sell for a few shillings. Hartlepool itself has been largely flattened and a new centre built. A few of the larger buildings survive, including Baltic Chambers, a huge redbrick building with a steep pitched roof looking in the middle of the acres of rubble like the town hall at Ypres after the First World War. We wander past miles of palings and upended sleepers lining recreation grounds and allotments. The word ‘television’ opening all doors, we are taken round the Athenaeum, a men’s club. The ceiling of the pool room, where tiny old men play snooker, is cone-shaped, like the inside of a hive. The walls are lined with cues in locked tin boxes, a name painted on each. Stephen is excited, thinks I should write a new scene for the room. The young man who shows us round apologizes for it. ‘Although’, he says happily, ‘it’s all going to be altered soon.’

  6 March, London (All Day on the Sands). What nobody ever says about writing is that one can spend a whole morning, like this one, just trying to think of a name … the name of a character, the name of a place, or, as in this case, the name of a boarding house. The boarding house has been jazzed up, made into a ‘private hotel’, rooms give the names of Mediterranean resorts: the Portofino Room, the Marbella Lounge. What should the establishment as a whole be called?

  Somerset Maugham set himself to write 2,000 words a day.

  Did you ever have this problem
, Somerset?

  I eventually settle on the Miramar.

  14 March, Leeds (Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf). A night shoot near Malvern Ground, a vast demolition site at Beeston overlooking the lights of Leeds. This is the frontier of devastation where demolition laps at the neat front doors and scoured doorsteps of solid redbrick back-to-backs. Neville Smith as Hopkins, the polytechnic lecturer, stands at a bus stop by a street lamp, the arc-lights trained on him, to say his one line at this location. It is ‘O my pale life!’

  In Barton Grove people come to their doors, oldish mostly, couples who have lived here all their lives, lives now narrowed and attenuated by this approaching tide of destruction. I suspect that Hopkins’s ‘O my pale life’ is me presenting an edited version of my own. Located in this desperate place, observed by these bewildered people, the line insults them. I insult them.

  The shot is soon done and we pack up. I imagine a similar scene, technicians coming to the bottom of a street, setting up lights as other groups arrive and stand about. A girl with a clipboard, a man with a loud hailer, waiting. Then the chief actor arrives and he is positioned under the lights, stood against a lamp standard. And shot. And not on film either. Or also on film. The technicians pack up, the cars drive away, leaving the body slumped under the lamp as the doors begin to edge open down the street.

  15 March, Leeds (Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woo If). Thora Hird arrives to film the main scene of the play, in which she meets her son, Trevor, and questions him about his private life (or lack of it). We are due to film in the Civic Restaurant below the Town Hall, but shooting cannot start until it closes, so we sit in the Wharfedale Room at the Queen’s Hotel having a long lunch. Thora was brought up in Morecambe, the daughter of the manager of the Winter Gardens, and she keeps up an unending flow of reminiscence; her early days in rep, her screen test at Ealing, her time with the Crazy Gang. While we chat Don Revie comes in and hangs about the entrance to the kitchen. A waiter appears and gives him a parcel. He uses the Queen’s Hotel as a takeaway.