Smut fest

It's something of a cliché to describe Alan Bennett as a National Treasure: but there's no escaping it, that's what he is.

"National Treasure" always seems to me to be something of a sexless thing: a creation that is warm and endearing and, above all, safe. Which is strange, because Alan Bennett has been pushing hard at a number of boundaries for some time (famously becoming engulfed in hysterical outrage when he decided to make one of the characters in his second series of Talking Heads -- and, by the way, that's an utterly extraordinary and wonderful pair of series and I urge you to rush out and get the DVD right now if you have never before seen them -- a paedophile. He refused to bow before the torrents of rent-a-quote gobshites, and, of course, it was utterly compelling telly.

Victoria Wood, another National Treasure, is also a bit of a boundary-pusher. Saucy and racy, a genius of staggering proportions, and yet her older women have, for several decades, been disabusing the rest of us about aging and propriety and what most of them are really thinking.

But back to Alan Bennett who is now pushing even harder, judging by the publication of his latest book, Smut.

A pair of novellas, the themes are about people (often older people) exploring aspects of their lives which have hitherto been suppressed or ignored. Unsurprisingly, I liked them immensely.

If I had to express a preference between the two I would err towards the first, with its story of a widower suddenly and rather startlingly being confronted by sex, in reality for the first time in her life (despite thirty years of marriage and at least one child). And finding herself rather engrossed with it. A feeling with which I empathise. The rather delicate and graceful conclusion feels both wonderfully uplifting and also inevitable, despite the way it might be thought to jar with the bourgeois belief system espoused by the lower middles classes in Britain to such stultifying and unrewarding effect.

And the second novella seems to reinforce that, focussing on a sneaky gay man who is so impressed with himself that he fails to spot the uproariously liberal lives being led all around him (except by his mother),

PS: I mean it -- if you have never watched Alan Bennett's Talking Heads I want you to buy the DVD right now.

You are in for some extraordinary writing and some even more extraordinary, power-house acting. They will make you laugh and cry, I guarantee it. Go and buy it. Now.