Alistair McGowan on HE Bates

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1:17Vicky Wicks:Shop Wayfair's Memorial Day Sale May 11th through 26th at the Wayfair store and we'll met. Wayfair, every style, every home.

1:28Alistair McGowan:BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts.

1:33Vicky Wicks:Today's guest is an actor, impressionist, pianist, poet and comedian who provided voices for the early series of Spitting Image on TV. Welcome, Alistair McGowan. Tell us whom you've picked and why.

1:48Richard Bates:Well, Matthew, I've chosen the writer H.E. Bates, who's probably best known for The Darling Buds of May, which people I'm sure will remember fondly from the television adaptations in the early 90s, with David Jason, also remade as the Larkins recently with Bradley Walsh. Best known for that. And also probably the novel Fair Stood the Wind for France. But H.E. Bates wrote so much more than that.

2:09Vicky Wicks:What do you love about him most?

2:10Richard Bates:Oh, goodness me. His love of nature, kindness, the fact that the stories are about love, they're about friendship, his sensuality particularly, and also just the fact that he was so versatile. He was really a short story expert. Yes, I love his short stories. Yeah, this is a form which has always fascinated me. I was lucky enough to be pointed towards them for my A-level. We studied Maupassant. We studied Joyce's Dubliners. And then I went on to read some Chekhov stories in my early career on the BBC, now available on 4Extra. And it made me very interested in that form. And I discovered Bates' short stories and continue to discover new ones that I've never come across before.

2:48Richard Bates:He wrote over 200 of them. And I think that H.E. Bates was the best short story writer in any language ever in the world. That's quite a claim. well also yeah and the fact that he's sort of not known for that and he's only known really for the Darling Buds of May by a few people now if they know him at all but I honestly think he's the best short story writer and his contemporaries we think of you know people like Graham Greene, Evelyn Moore and Orwell we know about because they wrote a landmark novel Bates didn't but I think his style his content is as good as any of those writers and to me it's a minor literary tragedy that he is so little known and so little trumpeted and I would urge anybody who doesn't know his short stories go and read them and if you want the novellas as well i read two in preparation for this in the bath um but in 80 minutes it was a long bath you can read the triple echo or you can read dulcimer and you will have your breath taken away his style his passion his sensuality i think i said that earlier on considering most of his novels were written and are certainly set in the 30s 40s 50s i realize with alarm as i'm sure we all do when you play these maths games that that era i was born in 1964.

3:52Richard Bates:That world is much closer to the world I grew up in than the world today. Herbert Ernest

3:57Vicky Wicks:Bates, as it possibly said on his bank statements, was born in 1905 in Northamptonshire but he's probably best known for his series set in Kent and I'm told you once auditioned for a role in The Darling Buds of May which was wildly successful but you didn't make the cut.

4:15Richard Bates:I didn't. Didn't get the part and so I was probably turned down by the producer, whoever that was. And in a way, I thanked them because, you know, I wouldn't have had the career I've had had I gone on to do that. But at the time, I watched the first one go out, I remember, and saw this man called Philip Franks playing the part I would have played, which is Charlie, Mr. Chanton. And Philip, you know, did it very well, of course. But I was watching it thinking arrogantly, as one does, when one's turned down for these things, that I would have done it better. So I watched 10 minutes of it and switched it off and thought, right, if they didn't want me, I'm not watching it, which is ridiculous.

4:47Richard Bates:but an act of jealousy goes a long way and the other thing which we must talk about I'm sure we will talk about is this extraordinary unique contribution that he made to Britain's war effort and I would go so far as to say again that what Noel Coward did for the British war effort and for the spirit of the nation on film Bates did through literature now Coward we know about we see his films all the time in which we serve etc and they were great morale boosters Bates was doing that through literature and is forgotten and again I think that's it it's a huge shame because he was a massive part of British society at that time.

5:20Richard Bates:And we will return to that. It is, as you say, very important. You said that in a very Churchillian way, Matthew. We will return to that. I'm glad we will. Thank you. That was you, by the way. That was me? I don't sound like that. Well, no, perhaps. No, no, you don't. We'll come back to that as well.

5:41Vicky Wicks:Here he is, H.E. Bates, that is, in 1960, from a series called Town and Country. Take a listen.

5:49Alistair McGowan:Now, Mr Bates, you've been down in this part of the world quite a long time, I think. Oh, the better part of 30 years. We came here in the days of the Depression in 1931 when we first married. This is a house which was then a barn, a granary, part of an old home farm belonging to a large estate which had just been broken up. when we first came to live here. The view you see from the windows was a very different one, where you now see large beds of flowers and so on and so forth. There was a haystack and piles of junk and nettles and so on and so forth. There's been a great change in the house and the garden, but in the actual village green where the house stands, there's been hardly any change at all.

6:40Alistair McGowan:One of the very few places, I think, in the district and perhaps, you know, in England, in southern England, and it hasn't changed at all.

6:48Vicky Wicks:What do you think, Alistair? Have you heard enough to be able to do an impression of that?

6:52Richard Bates:No, not at all. I was far too interested in what he was saying to listen to his voice, actually. I couldn't hear a hint of Northamptonshire in there at all, which I thought I might do. That sounds like it's towards the end of his life. So he died relatively young, I suppose, in modern terms, 68. And I know he tired himself out frequently, the amount of writing that he did. but it's wonderful to hear him and also talking about Kent and in a way I was just thinking this may sound daft but I think in a way he was like Noah in that from what I can gather the place that he moved to and what he did with it when nobody else was doing this sort of thing either I mean he really was such a dreamer H.E.

7:27Richard Bates:he just transformed this barn restored this barn when people weren't doing that people do it all the time now but he was almost creating the world that he wanted to live in the world that he wanted to have been

7:36Vicky Wicks:in his writing as well as in his life

7:38Richard Bates:Yeah, and where he grew up, but he did it sort of better than where he grew up. He was creating this idyll surrounded by nature. He even wrote books about gardens and gardening. Loved the natural world so much. But his writing generally is very sparse, which is what I like. But sometimes the only criticism I'd have of him, and it's particularly in one book, which is Love for Lydia, which was made into a television series in the late 60s, early 70s, I think. In that book, he talks so much about the flowers. And every time he walks to this particular house where Lydia is and her family are, he has to describe every flower and what state it's in.

8:09Richard Bates:And you think that's probably post the gardening book. But he just loved the natural world. And again, it's an affinity that I have with him.

8:15Vicky Wicks:Also here, we have his granddaughter, Vicky Wicks. And on a line from South Africa, his son, Richard, who directed that hugely successful TV version of his Darling Buds of May books. How did they come about, Richard? I think you sold it to Yorkshire TV. Tell us a bit about that.

8:32Alistair McGowan:Actually, I was the executive producer. And I want to assure that Alistair was not me that turned him down for the part of Charlie. However, I will lay claim to having discovered Catherine Zeta-Jones for the part of Mariette. My partner and I went to a television market, which was held in April every year in Cannes. It was like the Cannes television festival. we went there and there I bumped into somebody who turned out to be the head of entertainment for Yorkshire and was a Darling Buds fan to cut a long story short he said oh that's wonderful that's wonderful I'd love to do that and I said well you know be my guest he said um how long are you staying here for I said well we're here to the end of the week he said I'm going to phone you at the end of the week when you're back in your office give me your phone number he said I'm going back to the office this afternoon.

9:34Alistair McGowan:So he disappeared. And I thought, well, we'll never hear from him again. Following Friday, I'm back in the office with my partner, and Vernon phones from Yorkshire and says, right, we're on. Pardon. He said, David Jason says he'll do it. He got David to read the book overnight. And so he was able to go within 48 hours of meeting me. He was able to go upstairs and say to the bosses I've got a new series, Darling Buds H.E. Bates, David Jason.

10:07Vicky Wicks:Alistair could you just in a nutshell tell us what the Darling Buds of May books were? Who were the characters?

10:15Richard Bates:Well the main character and the genesis of this is fascinating. He was in quite a slough his previous novel The Sleepless Moon which I think is better than Lady Chatter's lover I think. But he observed in his slough of depression outside a garage this family who turned up in a painted blue lorry, and they were deliriously happy. There's Pop, played by David Jason, Ma, who is a big woman, and these children, and they were eating ice creams and eating crisps at the same time, and they were really the rural embodiment, I think, of the you've-never-had-it-so-good feel of the 50s. They gorge on life.

10:49Richard Bates:He has a wonderful description of them in his autobiography. He says they thought through the pores of their skin, and they just love life, and everything is happy. And Pop Larkin, really, he admitted, is based on himself, this wonderfully happy man who sees joy in everything, doesn't pay tax, lives outside society. But they are full of very amusing stories, but they are just so sensual. Everyone's fit to bursting with everything. It's an extraordinarily happy experience.

11:16Vicky Wicks:Now, let me put that to his granddaughter, Vicky. Was your grandfather anything like Pop Larkin? Well, you're certainly right that he really that was really very much his philosophy. It was so much about love. And he didn't also believe in saving. So he would have poo-pooed the idea of you sort of being a mouse, poor Miss Pilchester, you know, eating a little bit of cheese. He thought it was absolutely dreadful. If you had something, you had to live, you know, open a bottle of wine. Chaps, you know, he'd throw his arms out when we all arrived. He absolutely loved family life. He loved people to be enjoying themselves.

11:54Vicky Wicks:and a marvellous Sunday lunch with my grandmother who was absolutely fantastic at cooking. And I have to say that when I grew up, I was born in 59, my memories are completely infused in the happiness that he got from those books. My aunt used to say you could hear him laughing when he was writing them, either in the study or in his little summer house. These visits were to Kent when he'd moved to Kent, were they? Yes. Fortunately for me, my parents didn't really like taking us on holiday with them, so they'd dump us with our grandparents, which was absolute heaven because it really was heavenly.

12:28Vicky Wicks:And everybody would talk all the time about the characters and who was this person and who was that person. It just seemed to infuse all our mealtimes. Let's go back to the beginning. He was born in Northamptonshire, went to Kettering Grammar School. His first job was as a reporter, which he hated, and then a warehouse clerk, which gave him time to write. What about you, Alistair? what were you like as a young man? Is that how it was for you? Were you ever a clerk?

12:57Richard Bates:Well one thing I used to do was to pick plums and fruit and veg I was brought up in the Vale of Evesham and that's what people did and I think again that brings that's all brought to life by H.E. Bates' work where he talks so lovingly especially in the Darling Buds of the fruit picking season What was he like as a father?

13:14Alistair McGowan:Well he wasn't a very tall man all of his children I think we were taller than him I don't know how that came about and he was very much a family man, always fun. I mean, we were all born before the war and even in the early days of the war, he would take us out into the countryside. One of his particular hobbies was fishing and just near our house, we had a pond. He would bait up a rod for each of us and we would sit there with the Battle of Britain going on over our heads and fishing and then as we got a bit older, the war went on and he'd been to other parts of the country interviewing aircrew.

13:59Alistair McGowan:He would take us a bit further afield. There was a bigger lake and we would go there and there were bigger fish to be had there and that was much more exciting. By then, of course, we had doodlebugs dropping out of the sky over our heads. So the war was always with us, which was extraordinary looking back. He was there a lot of the time because he wasn't posted away. I mean, he would go and stay a couple of weeks or maybe less on a fighter station. And then he would come home for a few days and write. And he would say to air ministry, I'm not around, you know, I'm going home. He was the only person who could sort of walk out of the building without anybody stopping in.

14:40Alistair McGowan:He'd just say, I'm going home.

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15:44Richard Bates:I sold my car in Carvana last night. Well, that's cool. No, you don't understand. It went perfectly. Real offer, down to the penny. They're picking it up tomorrow. Nothing went wrong. So, what's the problem? That is the problem. Nothing in my life goes to smoothie. I'm waiting for the catch.

15:58Vicky Wicks:Maybe there's no catch.