I treated myself to no fewer than three pieces for tv by Alan Bennett today, two from the 4DVD set of Bennett at the BBC and a Talking Heads monologue off Youtube, featuring Bennett himself. In the course of wallowing in the brilliance of the writing it struck me that it really wouldn't be stretching it to claim him as Britain's greatest dramatist, yet one tends to think of his work as just being great because it is Alan Bennett, as if we've been gifted an extraordinary talent that somehow lies outside of normal run of the mill drama/literature.
Not all of the three pieces actually counted as lit, I suppose. The documentary he made featuring the big art gallery in Leeds, Portrait or Bust, which I watched for the first time today, seems to me the best thing I've ever seen about appreciation of the arts in general, and certainly the funniest. The strange thing is that the quite ordinary folk filmed going round the gallery manage to talk exactly like characters in the plays.
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