Four Stories by Alan Bennett

Author:Alan Bennett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books

FATHER! FATHER! BURNING BRIGHT

Father! Father! Burning Bright was the original title of a BBC television film I wrote in 1982 but which was subsequently entitled Intensive Care. The main part, Midgley, had been hard to cast, though when I was writing the script I thought it was a role I might play myself until, that is, I got to the scene where Midgley goes to bed with Valery, the slatternly nurse. That, I thought, effectively ruled me out as I didn’t fancy having to take my clothes off under the bored appraisal of an entire film crew.

Not that it would have been the first time. Back in 1966 I was acting in a BBC TV comedy series I had written which included a weekly spot, ‘Life and Times in NW1’, in one episode of which I was supposedly in bed with a neighbour’s wife. The scene was due to be shot in the studio immediately after a tea break, and rather than brave the scrutiny of the TV crew, I thought that during the break I might sneak on to the set and be already in bed when the crew returned. So I tiptoed into the studio in my underpants, failing to notice that a lighting rig had been positioned behind the bedroom door. When I opened it there was an almighty crash, the lights came down and everybody rushed into the studio to find me sprawled in my underpants among the wreckage and subject to a far more searching and hostile scrutiny than would otherwise have been the case. No more bedroom scenes for me, I thought.

However, the role of Midgley proved hard to cast and after a lot of toing and froing, including what was virtually an audition, I found myself playing the part. Like some other leading roles that I have written, it verged on the anonymous, all the fun and jokes put into the mouths of the supporting characters while Midgley, whom the play is supposed to be about, never managed to be much more than morose.

It was in the hope of finding more to the character than this that I decided, before the shooting started, to write the story up in prose. When I’d finished I showed it to the director in the hope that it might help him to appreciate what the screenplay was about. He received it politely enough and in due course gave me it back, I suspect without having read it, directors tending to form their own ideas about a text, one script from the author hard enough to cope with without wanting two.

So I put it away in a drawer in 1982 where it has remained ever since. I’ve dusted it off and published it now, I suppose, as part of an effort to slim down my Nachlass and generally tidy up.

ON THE MANY OCCASIONS Midgley had killed his father, death had always come easily. He died promptly, pain-lessly and without a struggle. Looking back, Midgley could see that even in these imagined deaths he had failed his father.

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