ALAN BENNETT

 22 July 2026 

The BBC has produced a collection of nine television plays and two documentaries written by Alan Bennett in the 1970s and 80s. Bennett is an English writer and  actor and those of you who are old enough may remember him from Beyond the Fringe with comedians such as Dudley Moore and Peter Cook.

Having purchased the DVD set, I confess I didn’t watch the documentaries but I did find all the TV dramas fascinating. Some I had seen before such as An Englishman Abroad about the spy Guy Burgess (played by Alan Bates) and A Question of Attribution about another spy, Anthony Blunt (with the wonderful Prunella Scales as Queen Elizabeth II). But the others were new to me. It’s hard to pick a favourite out of the rest of them because each has its particular charm.

A Day Out is a surprisingly powerful anti-war film as we spend the day with a men’s bike riding club in 1911. Our Winnie, with a young Lesley Manville, contrasts a manipulative art student with a family, including an adult “retarded” daughter, visiting a grave. A film featuring Daniel Day Lewis as Franz Kafka, The Insurance Man,  didn’t work for me but I was surprised at how effective 102 Boulevard Haussmann was: a dramatization of a period in the live of Marcel Proust, again staring Alan Bates.

In terms of surprise, the piece that most moved me was A Woman of No Importance. It was the first monologue written for television and it’s brilliantly performed by Patricia Routledge, an actor I’ve never been particularly fond of but this was a tour de force.

The only work Melbourne Theatre Company produced of Bennett’s was The History Boys in 2007. After I left the company they did produce Miriam Margoyles in The Lady in the Van. When I went looking for more of his writing, I came across some delightful diary extracts in the London Review of Books which gives you a taste of his sensibility these days: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n01/alan-bennett/diary

2007 The History Boys (MTC, Playhouse Theatre)


I've passed the DVDs on to a friend whom I'm sure will appreciate this writer with heart.

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