We first discovered the radio version of Alan Bennett's Forty Years On about twenty years ago. (I think it was the year the basement flooded and drowned all our singles.) It was a cassette, bought in a garage somewhere. I remember listening to it non-stop for a long holiday driving round the Scotland. I fell in love with it parked under a bridge, next to a chip shop, eating and listening. I think it's my favourite bit of media of all time. If I'd have last.fm running for my whole life the top thing on there would be Forty Years On.
Phrases from Forty Years On pop into my head all the time and I have to bite my tongue to stop myself saying them. "What is the meaning of these warlike habiliments?" "Speak for England, Arthur" "You're a stupid boy, Rumbold, but by God you're a consistent one" "The shoddy splendours of the new civility" "Tidy the old into the tall flats" "The crowd have found the door into the secret garden" (I have a similar problem with "Go back to your constituencies and prepare for government", and "When workers are on strike you don't cross picketlines").
Of course, having listened to it so much I now have no real idea if it's any good or not. It's just part of my life. But I suspect it really is good. It manages to be affectionate and satirical at the same time, parodying huge swathes of 19th and 20th century British life while making you nostalgic for them. And it's a bit less cloying and funnier and more playful than later Bennett. One of the pleasures of it is the way it sweeps up so much of the mis-remembered English canon. Bits of the book of common prayer, classical allusions that sound familiar but that you don't quite get, 'snobbery with violence', the war poets, Wilde, war-time politics and society, public school fiction. It's all in there.
For a while we even started building a Forty Years On library; Sapper, Buchan, Dorford Yates, Dodi Smith, Amery, Duff Cooper. Blimey.
I'm not sure if an isolated moment will sum it up particularly well, but this is one of my favourite bits. From the play within the play within the play, it's John Geilgud telling a fragment of story from a young aristocrat before the outbreak of the First World War. Posh people talking about driving fast is normally exactly the thing to make me angry, but the way this is written and read, and the spectre of the guns in France, always gets me.
MP3 here.
It's available in the iTunes store but buried as part of an Alan Bennett double bill. (iTunes link) It's well worth seeking out and downloading. This later version is good, but not as good as the original.
