Behind the fringe

‘Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three,’ Philip Larkin famously announced in his poem ‘Annus Mirabilis’, ‘Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles’ first LP.’ But the key line is a far more private confession, caught in parentheses like a gloomy thought bubble: ‘(which was rather late for me)’. Few of Larkin’s contemporaries would have been more sympathetic than Alan Bennett. In 1963 he was appearing on Broadway in Beyond the Fringe, the hit satirical revue that also featured Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller; and while this led to him rubbing shoulders with the stars (the first- night audience included Rita Hayworth and Stravinsky, and after another show President Kennedy popped backstage to say hello), he doesn’t seem to have gone much further with anyone else. He was simply too shy: happy to pretend to be someone else on stage (T. S. Eliot especially enjoyed his spoof sermon ‘Take a Pew’), but rather less good at being himself.