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As the film version of his award-winning play The History Boys comes to TV, Alan Bennett writes about making the movie and how it brought back memories of his first drama for television.
"The History Boys is the story of a group of Northern grammar-school boys trying to get into Oxford and Cambridge. It was originally a play directed by Nicholas Hytner at the National Theatre in 2004, then filmed with the same director and cast.
The showing of the film on 28 December, while not a nice rounded anniversary, reminds me that it was 35 years ago at Christmas 1972 that the BBC showed my first film A Day Out. This was the story of an Edwardian cycling club in Halifax that go to Fountains Abbey for a day out. And Fountains Abbey is where The History Boys ends.
I wrote about this in a diary I kept while filming The History Boys:
24 August 2005
Fountains Abbey. Been here before, I keep thinking, though not just about Fountains which I've known all my life. No, it's the filming that is the same. I first filmed here in 1972 with Stephen Frears when we were making A Day Out. Today we set up camp on the same spot and at one point we are waiting for the sun for a shot identical with one we framed all of 30 years ago. I show Sam Barnett [who plays Posner] and Russell Tovey [Rudge] and Justine from costumes the echo under the cliff at the east end of the nave, something I put in the script of A Day Out… That was the first film I ever did. Now I'm back at Fountains and maybe this will be my last film. Still, not a bad place to start and not a bad place to finish either.
As so often in films and plays one remembers best the parts that were cut out. On stage we never see any of the boys' parents but I was hoping to be able to remedy this on film by including a brief collage of the boys' home lives:
23 July 2005
Lockwood, I thought, would come from a poor background; his mother is a single parent, and while wanting him to go on to university doesn't know how it is to be paid for… He goes up for the scholarship interview in his trainers and ends up enlisting in the army as this will pay for him to go to Oxford. Whereas we never see Mrs Lockwood, we do get glimpses of some of the other parents, a few of whom were going to have a line or two. Mrs Scripps for instance, who is uncomfortable with her son's piety. "I said to him, 'Jesus is such a bad role model. You'd be better off with somebody like Paul McCartney.'" Mrs Dakin: "He's full of this new master. Sexual intercourse seems to have taken a back seat." And Mrs Crowther: "He's a lovely-looking lad. Get him in a bathing costume and he'd walk it. And these posh places, black isn't necessarily a handicap. It can be a plus."
These scenes survived until the penultimate rewrite, when they had to be cut on grounds of length. We get occasional glimpses, but the film like the play is about school, and the outside world scarcely figures.
The film of The History Boys is somehow sadder than the play though for no other reason than that one can see into the eyes of the characters as one couldn't on the stage. It wasn't sadder to make, both play and film hugely enjoyable. A final quote from my diary:
1 November 2005
In the earliest draft, one of the many quotations Hector [the boys' teacher] bandied about was from Jowett, the 19th-century Master of Balliol. "We have sought the truth, and sometimes perhaps we have found it. But have we had any fun?" Well, one thing that can be said about the play and the film is, yes, we did have fun, and lots of it."
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