It's always a big moment when celebrities emerge from surgery and "show themselves to their public" for the first time, isn't it, usually with a big smile on their faces for the cameras. This type of story always seems to make the headlines, and not just for our own royal family, with the likes of King Charles, and Kate Middleton, Princess of Wales, leaving hospital recently - it's very much a worldwide phenomenon these days, it seems to me.
Do you remember the other day, when the Baron Friedrich of Württemberg, King of Prussia, emerged recently from game-changing surgery and all the media hoop-la that that gave rise to? A lot of people said it was "over the top", remember?
And it's a bit like that this morning here in Malvern, Worcestershire, when I finally emerge with my wife and consort, Lois, to carry out my first very public "walkabout" since my hip replacement surgery last month. No cheering crowds exactly, but, even without that, I sense a general public satisfaction this morning, albeit unspoken, a realisation that "Colin is getting over his surgery - what a 'trooper' that guy is!", which is heart-warming even in the absence of any overt "spoken-ness".
I sensed also that people were taking sly glances at my hip, and smiling with respect, as we strode carefully through the buttercups on the common, although Lois tells me later that I was imagining it, so the jury's still out on that one.
under the approving glances of the 700-million-year-old Malvern Hills,
this is mine and Lois's first, deliberately low-key, public 'walkabout'
since I had my new hip installed at Redditch Hospital last month
I conclude that my new hip and I are now permanently "joined at the hip" - is that an appropriate phrase? [No! - Ed]
At the end of our walk, Lois and I relax at one of the outside tables at the local Poolbrook Kitchen and Coffee Shop with a bunch of other old codgers.
we celebrate the end of our first, deliberately low-key, public 'walkabout'
at a local coffee shop with a bunch of other old codger couples
Still, that's retirement for you isn't it - and you've got to do it properly. You only retire once, don't you haha!
Last night we watched a repeat of an old Alan Bennett TV play, Sunset Across the Bay (1975), about an old codger couple from Leeds who retire aged 65 to the seaside resort of Morecambe, Lancashire, something they had dreamed about doing all their working lives.
We never find out their names - the wife just calls her husband "Dad", and the husband just calls his wife "Mam" [note for dialect buffs: "mam" is the variant for "mum" or "mother" particularly popular in the North East of England, also Wales].
Predictably perhaps, when the couple get to their dream new retirement flat in Morecambe they don't know what to do with themselves, and just bicker their days away, walking along the sea-front, trying to avoid what "Dad" calls the bores among other old codgers in the shelters on the Promenade, and "Mam" looking with disapproval at the skimpy mini-skirts of the local teenage girls.
They then go home "for their tea" and spend the evenings bickering in their armchairs, and then bicker in bed at night through their long hours of fitful sleep.
Their old bed somehow "doesn't feel the same", "Mam" thinks, and "Dad" says it's been put out of whack by the saga of moving all their furniture the 90 miles or so from Leeds to Morecambe.
Oh dear - not the kind of image of retirement that you want to have in your head as you struggle through the final, increasingly tiresome, phases of your working life, is it, to put it mildly!
[Note for dialect buffs: it's interesting that "Dad" uses the word "flitting" for "moving home", an Old Norse word from the time when Yorkshire was part of the Danelaw jurisdiction of 1000 years ago].
[That's enough dialect notes! - Ed]
Lois and I enjoyed the play last night, when it was shown again by the BBC to mark the 90th birthday, this week, of its writer, Alan Bennett. And we're looking forward tonight to seeing the interview Bennett gave to the BBC's theatre and arts correspondent, journalist Mark Lawson, on the occasion of Bennett's 75th birthday, back in 2009.
During this interesting interview re-shown tonight, Bennett reveals that the character of "Dad" in that play "Sunset Across the Bay" was in fact based on his own father, a quiet, shy man who ran a butcher's shop in Leeds in the 1940's. Bennett says that he was never close to his father: there was no hostility there, he recalls, but he suddenly realised, when finally seeing his father die suddenly from a stroke like the "Dad" in the play does, that even in Bennett's own childhood his father had never once kissed him and that he had never once kissed his father.
It was an uneventful childhood, Bennett recalls - even in the war nothing much happened in Leeds: the Nazis didn't think it was worth wasting their bombs on it. Oh dear, not much of a recommendation there, was it!
Bennett says that what he remembers most from his childhood days was the shame he felt in front of his classmates in grammar school, because of the family's shabby house, which they entered from a back alley from which you "went straight into the living-room - there was no entrance hall".
He talks a bit to Lawson about Yorkshire speech and conversation habits, particularly those of his mother, and of northern women in general.
He recalls a visit he made with his father to see his elderly mother, who was then in hospital at Keighley. His mother had started talking in hushed tones about another woman patient there who'd "tried to commit suicide three times", and then, realising that the woman could overhear what she was saying, quickly smoothed the situation over with a bright-and-breezy "Hello!".
Fascinating stuff, isn't it!
[If you say so! - Ed]
At school, the young Alan turned out to be a clever boy who passed all his exams, and the process of going to grammar school and eventually to university inevitably soon began to distance him from his intellectually more humble parents. Tonight, presenter Mark Lawson asks Bennett if he was always hoping that his "humble" parents would at least be proud of his achievements as an adult in the literary world.
Bennett says he also was hoping to somehow impress his parents, without falling into the trap of only writing things they would have approved of. He recalls his parents coming to see a performance of his 3rd play, "Habeas Corpus", and enjoying, not the play itself, but enjoying the pride of seeing that the rest of the audience were enjoying the play and were laughing at their son's jokes.
Bennett has never lost his Yorkshire accent, unlike many others from the area who have subsequently made a name for themselves in the media.
Sometimes, however, he feels he has to talk in a more "genteel" way when appearing on cultural TV programmes etc. And then the difficulty comes most with the vowel sound of 'u', he says. In Yorkshire the 'u' in words like "run", "sun" etc sounds identical to the 'u' in the standard pronunciation of words like "bull" and "bush" etc. When trying to "talk posh", it's easy to get this wrong, he says, making "bull" and "bush" rhyme incorrectly with the standard sounds of "hull" and "hush", thus "sounding ridiculous" in front of your cultural friends and colleagues.
Oh dear!
Grammar school was just the start of Bennett's long journey to eventual worldwide stardom. At university he met up with satirists and intellectuals Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller, and also Dudley Moore, and together the four of them wrote their famous review "Beyond the Fringe", which was eventually performed on Broadway.
Bennett and Moore, who came from humble origins, were always very much in awe of their upper-middle class collaborators Cook and Miller, he says, and even when the foursome were performing in New York and meeting people like the Kennedys, Adlai Stevenson and others, Bennett and Moore left all the talking to Cook and Miller, and Bennett never remembers having the courage to say anything at all to them himself.
It's nice tonight to see a snatch of one of Bennett's favourite characters, the pompous Anglican vicar starting on an interminable sermon of dubious value, a sketch which he wrote at university for an end of term college show, and which eventually ended up in "Beyond the Fringe".
Lois and I wonder how the vicar's story ended, hopefully with some kind of moral 'lesson' for his congregation.
If you can guess how the encounter between the vicar and the "personable young lady on the bench" might have ended why not jot it down on a postcard and send it to me. Winning entry wins 5 guineas, as per usual !
22:00 After the interview is over, Lois and I, intrigued to know why Alan Bennett's father might have called his son's play Habeas Corpus "cheeky", we google it, and we find this review of a performance at the Little Theatre, Seaford.
"Habeas Corpus is a gorgeously vulgar but densely plotted farce, an unashamed celebration of sex and the human body. Set in the Wicksteeds' house in Hove, the play revolves around a family and its acquaintances for whom instant gratification of carnal lusts is their ruling passion.
The effect is of an animated McGill postcard with the captions written by an elegant verbal stylist. The cast, a set of comic stereotypes - lecherous GP, unscaleably mountainous wife, celibate Canon, flat-chested spinster, seductive sexpot, sad hypochondriac and arrogant colonialist – are all in the grip of some overriding physical obsession: the doctor by unassuagable lust, the breastless wonder by the need for uplift, the unfired canon by the loss of virginity. Identities are mistaken, wires crossed and a falsie-fitter from Leatherhead stumbles into the proceedings aiming his prehensile fingers at all the wrong bosoms.
Gini Comyn’s imaginative direction captured brilliantly both the seaside postcard and the Bennett’s rapier-like digs at the permissive society. She was well-served by some beautifully-judged performances. Tony Bannister gave Arthur Wicksteed, the randy GP, a veneer of smooth professionalism barely concealing an irresistible lust. He had the most lyrical passages of the evening, expressing lonely yearnings and regret for lost youth, along with some acerbic asides. His object of desire, Felicity Rumpers, was deliciously played by Lauren Nicole-Little, whose nubile attractions also became the focus of Wicksteed’s hapless hypochondriac of a son, Dennis, played with gormless hilarity by Chris Church.
The plot was complicated by Alan Lade’s ‘thrusting young vicar’, Canon Throbbing, who managed to mix a superficial religiosity with a basic desire, as he puts it, to be ‘in the forefront of Anglican sexuality’. He is loosely engaged to the flat-chested Connie, Wicksteed’s sister, who, persuaded by the nosy, ubiquitous and bustling Mrs. Swab, the ‘lady wot-does’ [played with an arch proletarian glee by Margaret Kennedy], invests a fiver in a pair of falsies. Lindsey Holledge brought to Connie a desperate longing for physical enhancement and her metamorphosis as a femme fatale in Act Two was a joy to behold - as was the galleon in full sail, Cathryn Parker as Muriel Wicksteed, the long-suffering wife of the Lothario physician. Up for a spot of dalliance on her own accord, she flung her considerable presence upon Mr. Shanks, the falsie-fitter [a delightful cameo from Damian Sutton] and Sir Percy Shorter, played with pompous shiftiness by Adrian Bowd."
Oh dear, "cheeky" sounds like a bit of an understatement, we feel ! And we admire Bennett's father for "staying the course", even if he didn't understand his son's jokes.
Fascinating stuff, though, isn't it!
[Oh just go to bed! - Ed]
We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!
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