Submitted by
Nicky Smith
Alan Bennett on AMOLAD
Yorkshire write Alan Bennett, writer of the famous "Talking Heads"
TV monologue and much, much more.
The London Review of Books for 2nd Jan 2003 contains extracts from Alan
Bennet's diaries for 2002.
19 Jan.,
Watch a video of Michael Powell's A Matter of Life and Death (1946), the
first time, I think, that I have watched it all the way through since I saw it
as a child at a cinema in Guildford. Then its particular interest was that the
village scenes featuring the local doctor (Roger Livesey) had been shot at
Shere, a picturesque village below Newlands Corner where we'd sometimes go on
walks. Livesey watches the goings-on in the village via a camera obscura,
though why he does this isn't explained or the workings of the device either,
which must have mystified most people at the time. The notion of eavesdropping
keeps coming up in Powell's work until with Peeping Tom it virtually ended his
career. Other oddities in AMOLAD
[Bennett's term]
are the naked goatherd
playing the flute, an unlikely sight on the Norfolk sands, I would have
thought, even in 1945, and a man with wild red hair (looking like Leonid
Massine in The Red Shoes) who brings Livesey and David Niven tea in the country
house where some amateurs are rehearsing A Midsummer Night's Dream. This house
seems to be set on a series of steps which, though the film was shot in the
studio, relates it to Hardwick Hall
[Nicky: Isn't this the camp in Blimp?]
[Steve: That's what Clive says when he reads the note but the note
actually says Hardleigh Hall]
and also
to the dream sequences that follow with a stairway to heaven. The steps,
coincidentally, chime in with a poem by the recently dead Ian Hamilton printed
in the LRB .
"We are on a kind of stair. The world below
Will never be regained; was never there
Perhaps. And yet is seems
We've climbed to where we are
With diligence, as if told long ago
How high the highest rung."
[He certainly knows his P&P films]
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