This program me contains some strong language
"Two things one seldom hears about getting older.
"One's ears get larger,
"and one's dick gets smaller.
"Most distressing is to find not only one is old,
"but like all the other old people.
"At 60, one is an individual still.
"At 90, one is a cliche."
These are just, um...
Er... That's the list of the clips, I think.
The thing that I'd quite like to include...
Oh.
Can you see it, Alan? I can see it, but it's...
I can't read my own writing.
Oh, well.
I've arrived at 90, feeling every minute of it.
the trouble is, I'm rewriting it as I'm reading it,
and then I dry up.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Anyway-
He is, of course, one of the original Beyond the Fringe quartet.
He taught history at Oxford and is, according to his own admission,
an awful person to interview.
Alan Bennett.
Having arrived, slightly to my surprise, at my 90th year,
I wasn't unduly dismayed because, despite its infirmities,
it would give me an opportunity to sum up,
set out what I've learned.
In a word, pronounce.
But what?
Not much.
I seem to have learned nothing,
except perhaps the importance of luck.
The two biggest strokes of luck in my life
were meeting my partner Rupert Thomas,
and working almost exclusively with another surprise encounter,
Nicholas Hytner.
Rupert and I been invited to visit the set of a new film that I wrote
before Covid, and then it was put off
and I despaired of it being produced.
But it has been produced and been filmed this last month,
and it's called The Choral.
It takes place in 1916,
and it's about a choral society in a northern town.
It's being directed by Nicholas Hytner.
Ancl cut for the rain!
And cut!
I seldom watch my own stuff once it's been shown on television
or in the cinema, but I agreed to do so
for the purposes of this film,
though, it meant looking back over more than 60 years.
I started umpteen plays that never get any further,
plays that don't get written...
I said, "Well, you're number one with me, too.
"Give me your teeth. I'll swill them."
I don't see how we can do it like that.
Um...
We don't have to say much about them.
Yes.
Um...
I'm sorry to be so... self-conscious.
I don't know, I think I've exposed my own incompetence.
I don't know what I can do.
Beyond the Fringe!
With the original cast of... Alan Bennett...
Peter Cook...
"Jonathan Miller...
and Dudley Moore!
Peter was the person who could just instantly write
because he could improvise endlessly.
I mean, he couldn't help but do it.
John Bird said that it was a disease he had.
Perkins? Sir. I want you to lay down your life.
Yes, sir.
We need a futile gesture at this stage.
Jonathan was recycling a lot of old Footlights stuff,
which he'd done at Cambridge.
♪ Though not all... ♪
Dudley, rather glumly, said he was the musician,
and we were all sorting words, obviously,
and didn't think much of music,
but in a way he was the most talented.
Squadron scramble!
Just some of the few to whom all of us owe so much.
Suddenly, Jerry was coming at me out of a bank of cloud.
I let him have it, and I...
I think I must have got him in the wing
because he spiral led past me out of control.
'What I remember of that is I used to'
sort of do an imitation of Douglas Bader,
the legless air ace...
and I used to stomp down the steps, stiff legged,
and people used to hiss.
I had a pretty quiet war, really.
I was one of the few.
I thought I was somehow pushing the boundaries of, er,
I suppose satire, I thought.
But it wasn't that.
I just wanted to make a mark.
Please, sir, I want to join the few.
I'm sorry, there are far too many.
We weren't well suited to one another, really.
When I started to write on my own,
it was a great release.
Is it very competitive?
If you're a comedian, that makes you competitive.
Competitive is making the audience laugh.
And who makes the audience laugh most,
that's what the competition is about.
I believe you should let people praise you.
It's part of the performance.
I've never been very good at this, and this has been misconstrued
as modesty.
It's not modesty.
It's more like incompetence.
You must have known from Beyond the Fringe that you were funny,
that people laughed.
You can't have been lacking in confidence... Yeah, I accept that
it's what people... I mean, even the sort of favourable reviews say,
um, er, "Has he got the range to do it?" And so on.
Well, I don't... It's probably quite true.
I don't have, except that... I don't know that one does...
How incomprehensible that is.
You're nervous.
Until the initial idea comes. Um, sort of my face is
bony and miserable and sort of, you just can't do anything with it.
You can't hide it, it's there.
Ridiculous. I was so apologetic and nervous
and, er, fiddling about.
Hmm. Anyway.
I'm sometimes accused of always wearing the same clothes.
The outfit I've pretty much worn since I was an undergraduate.
I don't dispute this, with the tie in particular
something of a fixture.
It's a school tie, though not my school
as it comes from Age Concern,
the charity shop in the marketplace in Settle.
It's probably a public school sports tie.
I know it's from a private sector because on the inside of the tie
is a Cash's name tape with its one-time-owner's name.
The name is justice.
I'd like to think it's not inappropriate.
Albion House school.
The setting for Forty Years On,
a play which opened in London this week at the Apollo Theatre.
The author is Alan Bennett.
Forty Years On is the first full length production that is written
for the theatre, and he appears in it himself.
Finding myself at this advanced age expected to report,
is not all that different from the position I'm often in
as a playwright looking for a memorable ending to a play.
Perhaps my most notable ending was of my first play,
Forty Years On,
which I was lucky enough to star john Gielgud.
That was my first term as a schoolboy at Albion House.
I can see now the faces of some of my schoolfellows
on that never-to-be-forgotten November morning,
many of them sons of old boys
who, proud trees for the felling, fell in that war.
The epilogue to Forty Years On is self-consciously poetic,
but not unmemorable.
"A butterfly is an event."
And, "Were we closer to the ground as children?
"Or is the grass emptier now?"
Also says a great deal, and it's quite a prophetic speech.
The hedges come down from the silent fields.
A butterfly is an event.
Were we closer to the ground as children,
or is the grass emptier now?
Once we had a romantic and old-fashioned conception of honour,
of patriotism, chivalry and duty.
But it was a duty which didn't have much to do with justice,
with social justice anyway.
The crowd has found the door into the secret garden.
Now they will tear up the flowers by the roots.
Strip the borders, and strew them with paper and broken bottles.
Yorkshire.
These days, the county's enjoying a bit of a vogue
which, since I was born and brought up here,
I find slightly insufferable.
The "ee ba gum" side of it always sounded a bit of a bore.
What I think of as Yorkshire speech
is a much more old-fashioned way of talking.
My father,
if you'd lost something and wanted to know where it was,
he would say,
"|'ll ascertain."
Also characteristic of Yorkshire is a grudging of credit.
And when credit is conceded,
it's often backwards.
"That's not a bad-looking woman."
"He's bright enough."
Some negative way of saying something positive.
Do you do it, Alan?
I suppose I do, but I don't notice it.
I, er...
I tend to, um...
Negative... Negativize
a lot of things, I don't know.
I used to get coal, when you were allowed to have coal,
from our coal merchant, Mr Redhead,
who was in the next village.
And I rang him one morning and said, "Mr Redhead, it's Alan Bennett."
"Oh! I am conversing with higher beings."
I said, "You said that last time I rang you."
"I kn ow,
"and I reiterate it."
It's a slightly ironic way of talking,
which is, in the nicest possible way, slightly taking the piss.
Breathe in! Breathe this air!
Phwoar, by 'eck!
Breathe in! It's a grand country smell, is this.
It does you good.
A Day Out, my first television film,
is about a men's cycling club in Yorkshire
on the eve of the First World War.
Never mind. It's good, clean muck.
My missus doesn't distinguish between sorts of muck, Mr Ackroyd.
Muck is muck to her, and it's anathema.
It was shot in very, very cold weather.
It was May, but it was more like February.
Here we are.
Journey's end.
Isn't that a picture?
I know one thing. My bum's numb.
I laughed, not at the joke,
but at the fact that Paul Shane was one of the cyclists.
He had to say,
"my bum's numb".
He couldn't say it.
And because I was quite early on in my career,
I didn't know you should never tell an actor how it...
Er, give a reading to them. You should coax them towards it.
But I couldn't get him to say it right,
and so he says on the film, "my bum's numb",
meaning there's a possibility
of other parts of his anatomy being numb.
A Day Out ends with the War Memorial in 1919
with the surviving members of the cycling club,
the others obviously having been killed in the war.
The film was partly shot at Fountains Abbey.
The fella that laid them stones knew what he was doing,
he'd be a monk.
I saw Fountains when I was, I think, eight,
because we were evacuated,
sort of, to Wilsill near Pateley Bridge,
which is not far from Fountains,
and I went there with my mum.
But Fountains is an extraordinary place.
I've shot at least three films there,
and I always delight in going there because...
because you're filming, there's nobody else there,
and it's such a treat.
All male community, was it, sir?
Of course. They were monks.
Bit of that, do you think?
The History Boys is about a group of grammar school pupils
trying to get into Oxford or Cambridge.
The film itself has become famous
because many of the young actors in it
have since gone on to distinguished careers.
♪ Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye
♪ Not a tear but a cheer... ♪
Ou voudrais vous travaille a apres midi?
Je voudrais travailler dans une Maison de passe. O0 la la!
Maison de passe? A brothel!
I didn't know whether it would work, it all being in COD French,
so I was quite gratified that it... it did.
Oui! La prostituee, s'ilvous plait!
A quel prix? Dix francs.
Dix francs.
Pour dix francs, je peux vous montrer ma prodigieuse poitrine!
I'm competitive, envious,
and I take pleasure in the achievements of my contemporaries
only if they are in a different game.
I've never entirely given up wanting to be someone else,
and it's what has spurred me on.
Do you look at your life, sir?
I thought everybody did.
I'm aJeW,
I'm small...
I'm homosexual
and I live in Sheffield.
I'm fucked.
In The History Boys,
it was generally assumed that I identified with Posner.
Gay, scrawny and unhappy.
Rudge?
Rather, I identified with Rudge,
not unhappy,
who tells Mrs Lintott, his teacher,
that he's glad to have got in at Oxford
because that was what his fellows wanted,
and so he wanted it, too.
That's me.
I only wanted it because the others did.
And my dad.
Now I've got in, I just feel like telling the college to stuff it.
One of my life's proudest moments came in 1957,
when I was rolling barrels
in the cellars of Tetley's Brewery in Leeds.
My parents turned up with my exam results from Oxford,
a postcard saying that I'd got a first.
My mother said, "Does it mean you've come top?
"Which was no surprise to her,
"as that was what I'd always done ever since elementary school.
"Not quite, but near enough."
She gave me a kiss.
Dad said nothing,
thinking, I imagine, that time would tell.
Which, I suppose at 90, it has.
Ha.
Ah.
That's Gordon and me...
photographed by a photographer called Lonergan's in Leeds.
He's three years older than me.
Did you have joint birthdays?
No, we didn't really make much of birthdays, really.
I was conceived in a strange bedroom.
My birthday, like my brother's, is in May.
And, though three years separate us, we were both born on the same date.
Counting back the months,
I realised we must both have been conceived
during the old August bank holiday
in a boarding house bedroom in Morecambe or Flamborough or Filey.
Nowhere like this, anyway.
Harrogate, where hotels abound and always have.
The Grand Hotel. Good morning. How may I help you?
I'll put you through.
The filming today is happening in the Crown Hotel in Harrogate...
Yeah, great.
Which I got to know when, in 1988,
I made a BBC documentary about it called Dinner At Noon.
What happened was the BBC asked me to do a documentary on a hotel,
and... and I didn't really take that on board, really.
I didn't...| didn't, um...
think of what I wanted to do.
And then as it got nearer, I panicked, really,
and wrote some snippets about my parents and about growing up
and about having meals out with them,
and how embarrassing it was.
And then when we got here,
we fitted those into the background of the hotel.
My parents like this side of hotel life,
and they would have liked this kind of hotel.
Weddings, dinner dances,
functions galore.
Not that there'd ever been anything
in which they'd dream of participating.
Only there'd be more to see.
They weren't used to hotels.
They regarded them as the lap of luxury.
They didn't feel that they belonged there,
or that they had any right to be there, really.
When we were at home, we always had our dinner at lunchtime.
And for my parents, anything that came after that
was never more than a snack.
So that when I was at university and they came to see me,
we'd go into the hotel dining room at night
and the waiter would present the menu,
and my mum would say the dread words,
"Can you do a poached egg on toast?"
And we'd slink from the dining room.
The only family in England not to have its dinner at night.
Oh, of course they're dead now,
but I grew much less self-conscious about them as...
as I got older,
um, and rather revelled in the fact
that they were so, um,
stuck to the way they'd been brought up, really.
Ariel Crittall, a grand 80-year-old lady
said, "What is it I don't have to do now that I'm 80?
"Oh, I remember.
"Tell the truth."
Sorry.
She also said, er,
"wear knickers", but I don't think I want to say that.
Is it this one?
There's another pile here, Alan. Yes. No, it's...
I think it's here somewhere.
It's here somewhere.
I'd just taken a tea up this morning when she said,
"Graham,
"I think the world of you."
I said, "I think the world of you."
She said, "That's all right, then."
I said, "What's brought this on?"
She said, "Nothing.
"This tea looks strong.
"Pull the curtains."
I can say nothing about Talking Heads
and take refuge in something I wrote later -
The History Boys -
in which one of the boys protests to his teacher,
who had dared to say "in other words" about a poem.
"With respect, sir,
"with a poem,
"it's a work of art.
"You can never say "in other words".
"|f it's a work of art, there are no other words.
"You can't look at a Rembrandt and say "in other words"...
"without claiming it's a masterpiece.
"|f I'd had anything more to add to Talking Heads,
"I would have done it at the time.
"Too late now."
Well, that's a warning for you.
Why? I can't talk to you about Talking Heads.
Well... Nothing more to say.
Well, it is true.
There's nothing I can add, really,
that isn't in the things themselves.
That was not meant as a... to put you off.
I was all right on the Monday.
I was all right on the Tuesday.
I was all right on the Wednesday until lunch time,
at which point all my nice little routine went out of the window.
The Talking Heads monologues began as a play
called A Woman Of No Importance.
It's of a woman dying.
Pat was very nervous about it
because she said it was radio, not television.
But anyway, we persisted,
and she took it on, and had a great success with it.
He said, "You're single?"
I said, "Yes.".
He said, "Where are your parents?"
I said, "Mother's in her grave
"and Father is in a Sunshine Home at Moortown.
He said, "Do you feel bad about that?"
He didn't look more than 17.
I said, "No, not after the life he's lived."
I saw him look at Dr Copeland,
only he was toying with the calendar,
sneaking a look at what next month's cactus was going to be.
Then this youth said,
"What life did he lead?"
I said, "A life that involved spending every other weekend
"at Carnforth with a blondified piece from the cosmetics counter
"of Timothy White and Tailors". He said, "ls that a shoe shop?"
I said, "You're thinking of Freeman, Hardy and Willis.
"It's a Chemist's."
And that emboldened me to do six more.
The one I did myself,
and other funny women.
The reason why they were all women, I think, was because
when I was young,
my dad wasn't much of a talker,
whereas my mum had two sisters and they were talkers,
and I was exposed to a great deal of feminine gossip and talk,
and that went in, I suppose.
Geoffrey's bad enough, but...
..l'm glad I wasn't married to Jesus.
They were called Talking Heads because in the television parlance
of that day, if you showed anything for any length of time
without a visual sugaring, really, a diversion,
somebody would say, "Oh, it's a bit talking heads",
meaning that that was not interesting.
Whereas it seemed to me when you got talking heads,
and got close in on a character,
it was the most interesting thing.
He said, "|n an ideal world, Leslie,
"|'d be happy to sit chatting all clay,
"but I have a very tight schedule
"and, although it's only 9:30 in the morning,
"can I see you in your bra and panties?"
I said, "9z30 in the morning, 10:30 at night,
"we're both professionals, Simon."
"But...", I said...
"can we put another bar on because if we don't,
"you won't be able to tell my tits from goose pimples."
I saw this fella's what-do-you-call-it today.
Oh, except I'm not supposed to say "what-do-you-call-it".
Verity says, "Phallus. 'What-do-you-call-it' is banned.
"When we cannot find the word we want, we describe.
"We do not say 'what-do-you-call-itfi"
Well, you won't catch me describing that.
Thora was wonderful to work with.
The last thing I did with her
was Waiting for the Telegram, not long before she died.
She said, "I got the script and looked at it
"and I thought, 'Well, I'm not going to swear for anybody else,
"'but I'll swear for Alan Bennett'."
And I thought, "Oh, that's a great tribute."
And then I thought, "Well, I don't think there is any swearing in it."
Er...
And then I realised what she meant was
it mentioned "penis",
and that was swearing to Thora.
She says, "Violet. I have to ask you this.
"Was the penis erect?"
I said, "Nurse Babsie, that's not a word I would use."
She said, "Erect?"
I said, "No! The other."
In Waiting for the Telegram,
she remembers her sweetheart coming to see her
on the eve of leaving for the trenches in the first war,
and hoping to sleep with her.
To her lifetime's regret,
she rejects him,
and weeps, remembering it.
And then he says,
"Take your clothes off now."
And I didn't.
I didn't.
And I wanted him so much.
I don't know, it was...
It was just the way I'd been brought up.
And he stands there looking down at me,
and then...
he picks his clothes up and he goes next door.
And after a bit, I heard the front door bang.
See, they look old in photographs compared with what they look now.
Only they weren't.
They were lads.
Same as you.
And just as grand.
I saw the... the yellow thing
the boy on the bike brings.
His sister fetched it round.
A telegram.
The monologue ended,
and there was a silence.
The silence was because the cameramen were crying.
When, years ago, we were in Beyond The Fringe,
we used to do cabaret very often,
and Peter and Dudley were always the stars.
They always made the band laugh.
I never did,
but I thought in the studio,
"Well, I never made the band laugh,
"but at least I made the cameramen cry."
I think I'm about to meet quite a few people
you know, in what I think, or what I thought in writing,
was quite a funny scene.
It's a scene in a tribunal for reviewing boys
who were conscientiously objecting.
Quiet, please.
They are brilliantly well cast.
They all look completely right, don't they? Yeah.
My mother's only brother was killed in the first war.
It was always poignant.
You would be referred to in the family as "your Uncle Clarence".
And Uncle Clarence was, I suppose, 17 or 18.
And he, er,
had a hernia.
And this excused him military service because
any operation at that time was risky.
He eventually went into hospital and had the operation.
And then, six months later, he was sent to the front,
and he was killed at Ypres in 1917.
The notion of the tomb of an unknown warrior was that of David Railton,
an army chaplain.
The body was brought from France with elaborate precautions
to ensure its anonymity,
and buried here, just inside the west door,
on November 11th, 1920.
No-one else had ever been buried at this spot,
and digging down, they came straight away to the sand and gravel
of Thorney Island.
Then the coffin was put in and filled with soil
that had been brought from the various battlefields in France.
A precise reversal of the Rupert Brooke poem -
"there's some corner of a foreign field that will be forever England."
The corner of the foreign field is here.
I count as education
what little violence I've seen.
There was violence only verbal in the square in basic training
at Pontefract in Yorkshire,
when the RSM of the York and Lancaster Regiment
bawled me out an inch or so from my face.
I can still feel the spit on my cheek.
I'm lucky not to have seen anything worse,
except I'd forgotten the occasion
when Rupert and I were ourselves attacked.
I can't offhand recall the year,
presumably because I was the object of the violence,
and not its observer.
It was in Italy, a small seaside town not far from Rome,
where, strolling one evening on the promenade,
Rupert and I were attacked by some local youths.
Lucky to escape with my life,
my assailant hit me on the head with a scaffolding pole.
In a life not overcrowded with incident,
what galled me at the time
was that everyone - the Italian doctors, the police -
no-one believed we had not been cruising.
A sophistication neither of us indulged in, or were capable of.
The injustice of that assumption rankles,
and perhaps explains why I've never drawn on it,
other than to record it in my diary.
That sounds like a terrifying encounter in Italy.
Well, it was. It was a fairly close call,
and we knew at the time it was.
There was blood streaming down my face.
But it was definitely homophobic? It wasn't just that they wanted...
No, they didn't want money.
If they did, they didn't go the right way about asking for it.
I mean, we'd probably have given them money, rather than, er...
submit to this rubbish.
My stuttering exit from the closet has been played out in public,
chronicled or implied in the course of umpteen plays and writings,
with some less ambiguous than others.
This is a new experience for me.
Yes?
Television.
I've never seen it before.
Do you like it?
Northern Ireland...
This?
"Australia, New Zealand,
the union of South Africa...
Television.
Pakistan...
It's the beginning of a new era.
Prick Up Your Ears is about the playwrightjoe Orton,
who was murdered by his lover, Kenneth Halliwell, in 1967.
Joe Orton was a much funnier writer than I am,
and a much better writer.
QUEEN'S CORONATION MUSIC
Joe Orton and his lover, Halliwell,
are often seen in bed together.
But their hands are never below the blankets.
It's very... It's very coy.
And I feel I contributed to that, but without knowing it.
If he throws off his bedclothes, tears away his bandages,
scratches his sores, and if he does not strive every clay
and always towards his own recovery,
then he must be restrained!
I am the King of England!
No, sir!
You are the patient.
Zadok the Priest by Handel
We still don't really know why King George Ill went mad,
but his illness and the shocking treatments prescribed by his doctors
were documented at the time in minute detail.
Do you think that you're mad?
I don't know.
I knew very little about madness
until my mother was struck down with depression.
Doctors are very keen to tell you that depression isn't madness,
but in many respects, it mimics it.
Madness isn't such torment.
Madness isn't half blind.
Madmen can stand.
They skip, they dance.
I talk.
Talk and talk and talk.
So, in the film, the touching relationship
between George Ill and Queen Charlotte
is partly derived from watching my father.
She was treated at the hospital locally,
and my father would always be there
on the stroke of 2pm when it opened to visitors.
I said to him, "You don't need to go as conscientiously as that."
And he said, "Well, I have to go because your mama's lost herself,
"and I know where she is."
"I know... I know what she is, and I have to be there
"when she begins to come back."
It's one of them buses with a lavatory.
Are you going to go?
I don't want to go.
I do.
Well, go then.
I don't want everybody to know I'm going!
Sunset Across the Bay is about a couple,
not unlike my parents,
who moved from Leeds to the seaside town of Morecambe.
All right, hold me bag.
The thing that strikes me about that is when she
entrusts her bag to Dad.
That invariably used to happen with my mum.
She was so frightened of putting a bag on the floor of the loo,
thereby polluting it for all eternity,
that she used to, er,
when she went to the ladies, she said, "Dad, look after my bag.
"Don't let anybody touch it."
As if anybody would.
He would hold the bag and wait for her outside the Ladies.
But he wouldn't tuck it under his arm, as she would.
He'd hold it slightly to the side
to indicate that he had nothing to do with this terrible object.
I went. Yeah.
It's very ingenious.
They've got it in above where they generally put the luggage.
You want to go.
I don't want to go.
That's your trouble.
No spirit of adventure.
I came to see that this business with the bag
was evidence of his affection and... and... and love, really.
And so I thought of it as a joke, but it wasn't.
Did you spend a lot of time in Morecambe as a child?
Well, it was the place Leeds people went for their holidays,
and it always rained, in my recollection.
My brother and me would go on the sand
if he was fit to go, but he very often wasn't.
You dug six inches down and you came to black mud.
It's not really a sandy place,
but, um, it was childhood, you know.
Morecambe was where you went on holiday.
Mr Bennett!
Where have you been?
Seeing my mother. Oh, how is she?
The same.
She doesn't remember me now.
I'm not surprised.
She doesn't see you very often.
You write about her all the time, one way or another.
You use your mother.
That's what writers do.
Miss Shepherd lived in a van in my driveway for nearly 15 years
until her death in 1989.
Hi, Alan.
OK, nice and quiet, please.
In The Lady In The Van, she's played by Maggie Smith.
Alex Jennings plays me.
And, once again, the director was Nicholas Hytner.
I was living in Primrose Hill,
not far from the foot of the hill.
And, um,
and Jonathan Miller was also living just around the corner.
Miss Shepherd.
Now, I'm a bit behindhand with things,
so there may be a bit of a...
Put your arm around my neck.
Oh.
I felt sorry for the ambulance man,
because on the several occasions when she
had to do with the ambulance men,
they never showed any indication that she smelt disgusting.
It required some effort to deal with her.
Well, she looked almost human in that clip.
She was normally never other than disobliging.
In England, the past is quite heavy.
We stagger under the burden of reminiscence.
Lost should lost be and not found.
It's over.
I can say I love England,
I can say I love Yorkshire.
I can't say I love my country.
I don't know what that means.
I put those words into the mouth of Guy Burgess,
the spy in my play, An Englishman Abroad.
♪ But in spite of all temptations
♪ To belong to other nations
♪ He remains an Englishman... ♪
So little, England.
Little music, little art.
Timid, tasteful.
Nice.
Yet one loves it.
You see, I can say I love London, and I can say I love England.
I can't say I love my country.
I don't know what that means.
Anthony Blunt says his friend Guy Burgess persuaded him
to support the communists in the '30s
as the best bulwark against fascism.
You claim that Guy Burgess recruited you as a Russian spy.
Wasn't it the other way round? No.
Who was the spy master then in Cambridge at that time?
No-one.
We all felt it was our duty to do what we could against fascism.
Ancl it was put to me by Guy it was my duty to do it.
When Sir Anthony Blunt, the keeper of the Queen's pictures,
was exposed as a Soviet spy in 1979,
the dramatic ironies of the situation
were immediately obvious,
and I wrote the central scene
of A Question Of Attribution,
in which Blunt and Her Majesty meet in Buckingham Palace.
Where are my papers?
You're supposed to be holding the steps.
I could have fallen flat on my face!
I think you already have.
Your Majesty.
I suppose that is part of your function, Sir Anthony.
To prove that my pictures are fakes.
Well, because something is not what it is said to be, Ma'am,
doesn't mean that it's a fake.
It may just have been wrongly attributed. Yes...
Though she never saw the play,
Her Majesty may have seen the film,
supposedly remarking, "Oh, no. She's not like me at all.
"She makes wisecracks. I never do that."
But she did.
And indeed, about the play.
Civil Division, Miss Prunella Scales,
for services to the performing arts.
When Prunella Scales was being given the CBE,
the Queen whispered,
"I suppose you think you ought to be doing this."
A laugh-out-loud wisecrack in anybody's books.
In Allelujah, my last play,
the last speech is given to Dr Valentine,
an Asian doctor who came here as a young man to study medicine,
but who outstayed his visa.
So, though he is now a good and qualified practitioner,
and English in all but name,
he is an illegal.
Why, I ask myself, should I still want to join?
What is there for me here
where education is a privilege, and nationality a boast?
Starving the sick, and neglecting the old.
What makes you special still?
There is nobody to touch you.
But who wants to any more?
Open your arms, England, before it's too late.
That's a pretty bleak view of Englishness.
Well...
It's...
I think it's my view, really.
Now.
I'm anxious that this should not be my last word.
Not because I have a great deal left to say.
I'm not sure that I have.
But I'm concerned that just because it's so late in the day,
I have to drum up some sort of lesson from life.
It's the sort of thing old men do.
Kept skinny by involuntary clear-outs,
I'm fearful of falling, which I've done once or twice.
Thanks or no thanks to two hearing aids,
I can eavesdrop on the workings of my own body.
I can hear my stomach gurgle
and my ankles groan,
which I find disturbing,
at one point mistaking it for creaking floorboards.
Ageing, though, is not quite as the best literary authorities
would have it.
Samuel Beckett is known for looking life in the eye
and sees getting old as drying up.
Ageing is sanitised as desiccation,
dry and dusty,
but it's also prone to dissolution,
often inconveniently so.
Waiting for Godot would carry more credence
if one of the characters cut short his runic wisdom
and made a bolt for the bushes.
It happens.
Treble's going. She's gone.
Um... I think you're going to say it was...
I'd like to thank the...
I know what I'm going to say.
On my 90th birthday in May,
I was asked to walk up to the local church in Yorkshire,
where a surprise had been prepared for me.
I sat down on the bench in the churchyard,
and the local team of bell ringers rang a peal of bells
especially for me.
It was very beautiful, though rather loud,
and I'd like to thank them for going to all that trouble.
It wasn't an official gesture, but the bee...
but the bell ringers' own idea.
I wanted to...
I wanted to say "But the beekeeper's own idea"!
Don't look so serious!
Don't look so serious.
Well done, everybody.