Amen! Brother Bennett
Alan Bennett was the oldest in pithy post-war revue Beyond the Fringe with comedy comrades-at arms, Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook, and Dudley Moore.
To this day, Bennett's beloved Fringe solo Take a Pew is sublime - a Beyond the Fringe favorite.
In stiff-upper-lip falsetto set to ceremonial pianoforte, (likely courtesy of Dudley Moore) Bennett opens the sketch in ministerial sing-song orating 'the text to us tonight' in scintillating stream-of-pompousness and repetition - a favourite device of all four Fringe men.
This introduction is amply supplied with pregnant pause. 'But My brother Esau is a hairy man.... but I am a smooth man.'
Bennett, digresses into further pious inanity, accentuating the age-old question 'where do you think you're going?' or 'the gist of that' - Bennett given this incentive when an irate railway station employee yells at him for going through the wrong door at the station en route to the sermon.
Another example of his sermonial point features Bennett and friend's life-altering climbing expedition as they reach a Scottish mountain summit.
"The mists of the evening began to come down, and the sun to set, and when we reached the summit, we sat down to watch this magnificent sight of the sun going down behind the mountains, and as we watched my friend very suddenly and violently ...vomited.
Some of us think life's a bit like that, don't we?
But it isn't.
Life, you know, is rather like opening a tin of sardines.
We're all of us looking for the key.
And I wonder... how many of you here tonight, have wasted years of your lives looking behind the kitchen dressers of this life for that key.
I know I have.
Others think they find the key, don't they?
They roll back the lid of the sardine tin of life, they reveal sardines, the riches of life therein, and they get them out, they enjoy them. But you know .... there's always a little bit in the corner you can't get out.
I wonder.
Is there a little bit in the corner of your life?
I know there is in mine....
And so now, I draw to a close, I want you when you go out into the world, in times of trouble and sorrow and hopelessness and despair amid the hurly-burly of life ..... if ever you're tempted to say.... 'stuff this for a laugh', I want you at such times .....to cast your minds back to the words of my first text to you tonight - but my brother Esau is a hairy man, but I.... am a smooth man".
Amen Brother Bennett.
Amen!
