Alan Bennett: interview

Alan Bennett‘s gentle Yorkshire tones and middle-class appeal too often pigeonhole him. But from his early days in ’Beyond the Fringe‘, through his pioneering television screenplays, to his latest work, ’The History Boys‘ – now a new film – a sly subversiveness has always permeated his work. Famously wary of journalists, the Camden resident grants Time Out a rare and candid interview to discuss the eroticism of education, the Queen‘s sense of humour and why he loves ’Footballers‘ Wives‘.

Griffiths in character as a groping teacher

You wrote ‘The History Boys’ at roughly the same time as ‘Untold Stories’, your book in which you were open for the first time about your sexuality, your mother’s long illness and your treatment for cancer. Did this new frankness influence ‘The History Boys’ at all?
I didn’t really think of it like that, because I thought: Well, it’s a play. ‘Untold Stories’ is different. That’s much more revelatory. Though not really revelatory, I don’t think.

For a long time, since the early ’80s, I’ve wanted to write a play about a charismatic teacher. I knew about the teacher whom a lot of the Private Eye people had, who went to Shrewsbury – a man called McEachran. He made them all learn snatches of poetry by heart and chant them out. He used to draw a circle on the floor of the classroom and put a chair in it and the boy whose turn it was had to sit on it and shout out the things he’d learnt. Richard Ingrams was taught by him. He was the person they all remembered from school. He brought out two books of these ‘spells’, as he called them, these snatches of poetry, and I got these books and started making notes for a play as long ago as that. That set me off.

It’s absurd when you think of the plays you thought you were going to write. To begin with, I tried to write a play in which Hector and Irwin were the same teacher, and there wasn’t this antithesis between Hector teaching one kind of learning for life, as it were, and Irwin teaching examination techniques. It was absolutely impossible. I look back and think I must have been so stupid. This is why I always think that other playwrights have more know-how than I have because it takes me a long time to realise things that seem to me quite obvious in retrospect. About the connection with ‘Untold Stories’: it hadn’t occured to me. If it was the case, it’s certainly not a conscious one.

In ‘The History Boys’ you sniff at the study of history as ‘entertainment’. Yet back in the early 1960s, you juggled being an academic at Oxford – studying and teaching history – with your role in ‘Beyond the Fringe’.
There wasn’t a conflict. I was a poor teacher – because my memory’s bad and I could never remember the stuff I was supposed to have read. The fact that ‘Beyond the Fringe’ was such a success at that time slightly compensated for that with the pupils, I must say, they were kind of glamourised that I was teaching them, though I wasn’t teaching them very much. What I did teach them, or did try to teach them, was what I’d not been taught – which is what Irwin teaches them, namely a way of going about answering a question and a technique, as it were. That seemed to me as valuable to them – since it was the only thing I’d somehow learnt or taught myself – as any medieval history I could teach them.

At the time, I thought that we’d finish ‘Beyond the Fringe’ and then I’d come back and be an academic. But I would have been a very poor one, so it’s a good job I didn’t.