Alan Bennett

I have never thought of Alan Bennett as a great playwright but often an entertaining one. I am possibly the only person in the civilised world who didn't much like "The History Boys" or the one about George the Second. I like him more than I like his plays. He's the "ordinary guy" who likes the idea of being ordinary but actually isn't - and I think it worries him.
George Melly told of how Bennett enacted a conversation he had heard between two women on a bus:
"What did the doctor say to your feet, Doris," and she replied "He said they'd not be much use to me in future. Not as feet."
He loves people, especially old women, but I doubt if he's a good mixer; he likes to watch and listen.
His sermon in "Beyond the Fringe" is a masterpiece; when you hear it you wonder why he never did much more of that sort of satire. I once mentioned that "sermon" to a Catholic priest who instantly proceeded to recite to me the whole of it - which I found rather surprising in that it is, after all, a satire on his profession or, should I say, "calling".
A conversation I heard a while ago would, I think, have appealed to Alan Bennett: two thirtyish women waiting for their kids at a school gate:
"I've told her.... I've said to her 'Janet, you're just not positive enough.' Know what I mean? She's just not positive." Pause for thought. "The thing is she's negative."
With some comic writers, like Woody Allen for example, if the story line is going one way and a joke is likely to take it another, they'll go for the joke. I am thinking of a play Alan Bennett wrote a long time ago in which the following superfluous exchange occurred:
Psychiatrist to wife: "How's your sex life these days?"
Wife: "Huh! He's asleep before his teeth reach the bottom of the glass."
He couldn't resist the temptation. But, of course, it is irresistible.