Tag: Radio Drama

Two Plays about John Betjeman by Jonathan Smith

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Something of a treat this for Betjeman fans, from Radio 4 extra. These two linked plays, Mr Betjeman’s Class and Mr Betjeman Regrets were first broadcast in 2017. Benjamin Whitrow does an excellent job of capturing the older Betjeman’s distinctive tones. He died during production and his role was completed by Robert Bathurst but you would never know.

The first play deals with Betjeman’s expulsion from Oxford, leading to his time as a prep school teacher, a role for which he is comically unsuited. This is just the latest in a line of disappointments for his father, played very well by Nicky Henson.

Betjeman junior is not the sort of son he would have preferred. He has no sympathy for John’s aesthetic leanings and a major cause of the difficulties between them is John’s lack of interest in taking over the family business. He thinks that his son’s university education has made him look down on his middle-class origins and turned him into a social-climbing time waster.

The second play is perhaps the stronger of the two, building on the themes of the first one. The older Betjeman is a National Treasure now. The success of his poetry and TV appearances have made him wealthy, but he is not altogether happy. He’s confused about his sexuality, and irritated that his poetry, although popular, is dismissed by critics who prefer the complexity of Eliot and Auden.

He ponders the breakdown of his marriage and his wife’s conversion to Roman Catholicism. He reflects that the feeling of guilt this gave him was actually very helpful in inspiring his writing. It was always a slightly difficult relationship and communication between them was conducted in mocking tones. Betjeman wonders whether he might have driven his own son away by talking to him in the same way, without quite realising that he was doing so.

There’s a sad sense of history repeating itself here, and the feeling that the young Paul Betjeman would have been more the kind of son his grandfather wanted. John’s inability to catch the ball when playing beach cricket with his father is repeated in a scene on the beach with his own son, who would prefer a father keener on games.   

Something that comes across very strongly is John Betjeman’s deep love for the Cornwall that featured so often in his poetry, the village of Trebetherick where his parents had a house, and the church of St Enodoc, where Betjeman himself is now buried. For much of the play, Betjeman is seated on a bench in the churchyard musing over his life. Both plays make full use of the fluidity of time and place that audio drama can convey so much more effectively than any other medium.

There is quite a lot of quotation from Betjeman’s poetry in both plays but I’m not sure what the autobiographical source was. He did write a verse memoir of his early years, Summoned by Bells, in which he says that his father’s monument in Highgate cemetery “points an accusing finger at the sky”.

Cocktail Sticks by Alan Bennett

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Cocktail Sticks is Alan Bennett’s dramatization of his prose memoir about his relationship with his parents. I listened to the BBC Radio 4 version. Bennett plays himself with the younger Bennett played by Alex Jennings.

Bennett is a deceptively straightforward writer. For example, he tells us that if he were a better writer, he would list all the items he found while clearing out his mother’s kitchen cupboard after her death. Then he goes on to list them anyway. Similarly, he suggests that a stable, secure family background is a problem for the would-be writer, because it deprives him of material. Then he goes on to prove himself wrong.

There are a couple of neat references to Philip Larkin here, I Remember, I Remember as well as the more obvious This Be the Verse. It’s worth remembering that Bennett is that crucial few years younger than Larkin and became more of an active participant in “the sixties” than Larkin ever was.

The play moves between Bennett’s narration and dramatized episodes from the past. Sometimes the past and present mingle, as when his father speaks in the present although he has died some years before.

There is a sort of standard narrative about the clever scholarship boy or girl who comes to be ashamed of their humble parentage. Bennett presents all this in a rather gentler way than some other writers have done. He tells us how he is ashamed now of his shame about his parents then.

The play is warm, witty and hilarious. Bennett clearly had a warm and loving relationship with his parents. It becomes poignant in the later part as his mother succumbs first to depression and then to dementia. Bennett has such a good ear for words that he can even make dark comedy out of his mother’s loss of language at the end. In fact, Bennett has the kind of feel for the absurdities of English that you normally expect to find in people who have learnt English as a second language. There is a neat play on the word “cocktail” and the way it is used to describe the mixture of drugs in Bennett’s chemotherapy treatment.

Bennett has written extensively about his early years and the question of what his parents knew or thought about their son’s sexuality haunts these works. There are hints here that they knew perfectly well what he was like, his father’s worry about how their “sensitive” son would cope with National Service and his mother’s knowing references to the writer Beverley Nichols. This is what Bennett captures so well, the rhythms of speech where things are hinted at and alluded to but never said directly. He has recorded not only the speech patterns but the social customs of that late 1940s/early 1950s era.

I think that rather like John Betjeman, Bennett has become the prisoner of a false reputation. Neither of them is quite the cuddly figure that they appear to be from the personae they adopted to present TV documentaries. There probably won’t be too many more works to come from Alan Bennett so we should make the most of him while we can.  

Money With Menaces by Patrick Hamilton

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For me, the broadcasting highlight of the holiday season was on the radio rather than the television. It was the play Money With Menaces by Patrick Hamilton. Actually, it wasn’t on the radio; it is a BBC recording from a few years ago that someone had kindly loaded on to YouTube.

A little research revealed that this was written for radio in 1937, shortly before Hamilton’s great stage success Gaslight. It is a gripping suspenseful piece, quite short and essentially a two-hander, a series of increasingly disturbing telephone calls. As the title suggests, it becomes clear that what we are dealing with here is blackmail. Part of the fascination for Hamilton admirers is the slow, insinuating way that “Mr Poland” tortures his victim. He talks round the subject in his dry voice and refuses to come to the point, stringing out the agony. It is almost Pinteresque.

This sort of thing features strongly in Hamilton’s novels. I am thinking of Mr Thwaites in The Slaves of Solitude, whose victims are stuck with him at the breakfast table. It might almost be a grown-up Ralph Gorse on the other end of the line. Those unfamiliar with this nasty piece of work, can make his acquaintance in my post about The West Pier.

The mechanics of suspense are worked out very cleverly. We are in the world where telephones were situated at a specific place, not carried in one’s pocket. The blackmailer leads his victim in a merry dance around the west end of London, from one phone booth to another. The telephone call provides many possibilities for radio drama. How do we know that the person on the other end of the line is who they claim to be? Francis Durbridge used this sort of thing to great effect in his Paul Temple series.

Thinking further along these lines reminded me of Ford Madox Ford’s 1912 novel, A Call. As far as I know, that was the first novel where the plot depended on the use of the telephone.

Without giving too much away about Money With Menaces, what seems to be increasingly absurd turns out to have a logical explanation. There have been later works on a similar theme by Roald Dahl and William Boyd.

I thoroughly recommend this as a gripping forty minutes or so on the radio – or should I say wireless?