Father! Father! Burning Bright (BBC Radio Collection) Cassette

Is it possible to read anything written by Alan Bennett in anything other than a poor attempt at THAT VOICE? With one of the most distinctive voices of any living English author, Alan Bennett and the audio book go together like fruitcake and cheese. (It's a Yorkshire thing.) Perhaps that explains why Bennett has so often ended up playing his own fictional characters; their mix of laconic poignancy, Northern realism and semi-autobiographical detail making them "hard to cast", as Bennett himself reveals in his notes on the origins of Father! Father! Burning Bright.In fact, this wry tale set in the tragicomic world of a Northern hospital, was written in 1982 as a BBC film subsequently entitled Intensive Care, although "care" plays a minor role in the last day or so in the life of Midgley Senior, unconscious and dying from a stroke complicated by hypothermia and pneumonia. The story is told from Midgley Junior's perspective. When the phone call comes, informing him matter-of-factly that his father is not expected to last the night, he is half-way through parent's evening, struggling to deal with the irate father of a pupil he has labeled "hopeless". His own lifetime of under-achievement, spent all the while convinced he has let his father down in some way, prompts a tentative dash around the Leeds/Bradford ring road in order to mount a bedside vigil. Determined to "make it right" before the end finally comes, morose Midgley must deal with the inefficiencies of the NHS and the attentions of largely disinterested family members. And then, in inimitable Bennett style, the unexpected occurs at a most inappropriate hour and Midgley is left feeling cheated, as though his father had finally played the trump card he'd been keeping in his pyjama pocket for just such a moment. After taking on the role of Midgley Junior himself in the BBC film, Bennett explains in his notes why he decided to write the story up in prose and how it then gathered dust in a drawer until a recent "tidying up" campaign. Oh, to have Bennett's drawers, harbouring such literary nuggets as this. --Carey GreenRead More