‘She goes off to the Maldives. That’s all I can remember about her,’ laughed Alan Bennett as he struggled to recall the name of the Australian physiotherapist he’d invented for his TV play about Miss Fozzard and her feet.
‘She goes off to the Maldives. That’s all I can remember about her,’ laughed Alan Bennett as he struggled to recall the name of the Australian physiotherapist he’d invented for his TV play about Miss Fozzard and her feet. Bennett had volunteered to subject himself to a Mastermind-style grilling from Mark Lawson (for Radio 4’s Front Row) after one of the contestants on the TV quiz had chosen Bennett’s plays as his specialist subject. Bennett scored more than his TV rival — just — passing on six questions (and getting a couple wrong). His lack of writerly pomposity, amused and not irritated by his own forgetfulness, was endearing. But the mock-grilling was also an intriguing insight into the workings of the creative imagination. How could Bennett have forgotten something which had once been so real in his mind? It’s a very real fear for anyone over the age of about 50 who’s becoming aware that their powers of recall are distinctly less awesome than they used to be. What happens to all those memories that were once so vivid, and which we believe are so crucial to what we’ve become?
We heard more about the weird ways in which memory works on Ramblings, which has just returned to Radio 4 on Saturday mornings (far too early) and Thursday mid-afternoons (hopeless, for anyone with work to be done). Clare Balding, who’s such a clever interviewer, never afraid to ask sharp questions but always in such a thoughtful way so as not to be offputting, was walking in Wiltshire with a group of people suffering from early-onset dementia.
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