 Alan Bennett is too easily dismissed as a safe dramatist, never more at home than when he is writing about some domestic setting where the custard creams sit next to commemorative teapots wrapped in their knitted woolen cosies.
Somewhere in the mix, Dame Thora Hird would usually give one of her sterling performances and thereby complete the scenario in which the writer has been totally overshadowed by the popularity of a single piece of work.
Yet recently, with The History Boys triumphing on Broadway and his winning a Tony award for his writing, Bennett is being rightly acknowledged as one of Britain's best contemporary dramatists.
His steadfast determination to write about English subjects make him stand out from others who have been influenced by America or have taken up the glib fashion of Tony Blair's New Labour project.
Bennett is a writer of a relatively unique perspective and this is especially true with regard to his relationship to, and portrayal of, the monarchy.
Bennett’s characters are typically of an England that rarely makes it to the front pages of the papers. Some might call it 'old' England, but it's really more like the England that exists outside the world of media driven London.
His writing exploits both the Yorkshire dialect, landscape, and people of his upbringing, and the more privileged world he experienced at Cambridge and beyond, after he and fellow satirists, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, and Jonathan Miller, found fame with Beyond the Fringe.
Since then, Bennett’s work has moved between the two worlds. An Englishman Abroad found popularity through its portrayal of a charming and drunken man-about town. The 'town' just happened to be Moscow and the man was the disgraced spy in exile, Guy Burgess.
In A Question of Attribution another member of Britain's most famous spy ring found sympathy at the end of Bennett's pen. This time it was the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, Sir Anthony Blunt, who — in dramatic form – even spent an afternoon at the Palace discussing the merits of forgeries.
More recently, audiences have been drawn to the character of the troubled monarch in Bennett's script to both the play and film of The Madness of King George.
In all of these works, Bennett's approach has been to play to the ordinariness of even the most extraordinary people. A man goes mad but must remain a king, whilst in A Question of Attribution, the Queen (or 'HMQ', as Bennett refers to the monarch throughout his scripts) delivers some of the most telling lines as she goes about the most mundane activity one can do in one's home: trying to reorganize the pictures on her walls.
 This ordinariness is to be found in Bennett’s diaries, where his own attitude towards royalty is based upon his distance to them:
"I have no experience of royal persons, some of whom I think may still 'what-what' a little. Today, though, it's easier. What royalty wants nowadays is deference without awe, though what they get more often than not is a fatuous smile, any social awkwardness veiled in nervous laughter so that the Queen moves her people buoyed up on waves of obliging hilarity."
"How happy we must all seem! Such tittering would have been unthinkable at the court of George III, reputedly the dullest in Europe, where no one laughed or coughed, and where it was unthinkable even to sneeze."
It's the ordinary and often dull routine of the royal life that catches the playwright's eye, such as his take on the historic Maundy Thursday ceremony:
"See on billboards in Leeds that HMQ has been in Bradford washing the feet of selected pensioners from the Bradford diocese, or rather paying them in order not to. Interviewed, all the pensioners say they are overwhelmed at the honour done to the region; one says she knew the invitation was something out of the ordinary as the envelope wouldn't go through her letter box."
"When I get to the village I find that one of these pensioners was our ex-postman Maurice Brown. I ask him whether the Queen spoke to him. "No. She only stopped at people who had something wrong with them. I haven't, so she just gave me the money."
(Untold Stories, p. 205-206)
The Queen fascinates him, both as spectacle and as a person caught in an extraordinary situation. A Question of Attribution is at its funniest when Bennett plays with the matter of elevation, HMQ deciding where to hang paintings:
HMQ: "And what about this annunciation you want to foist on me. Where's it been? In the cellar?"
Blunt: "Hampton Court."
HMQ: "Same thing."
Bennett is at his most acute when watching the events surrounding the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales.
Much is currently being made of the new Miramax movie, The Queen, in which Dame Helen Mirren plays the role of HMQ, struggling to overcome her nation's wish to become openly sentimental. The Queen is directed by Stephen Frears, a man who's collaborated with Bennett on previous projects.
In this new film's approach to the monarch, we see hints of Bennett, in whose diaries we find the admiration for the institution of monarchy:
"Given my royalist inclinations, I haven’t followed the goings-on over the break-up of the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales, or read any of the literature it has occasioned."
"I don't say this prissily. In my own circle of friends divorce dismays me for entirely selfish reason: it alters the social landscape in unpredictable ways, curtailing friendships, shutting down havens, and generally making life less comfortable."
"The Prince of Wales's marriage, I need hardly add, does not impinge in quite this way, but like everything to do with the monarchy I'd just like to be able to take it for granted as one used to do. I don't want to think about it. I just want it to be there."
The wish to 'just' have the monarchy 'there' is the same sentiment which one might wish for a more English version of grief, as Bennet himself notes:
"Hysteria over the death of Diana continues, people ‘from all walks of life’ queuing down the Mall, not merely to sign the book but to sit there writing for up to fifteen minutes at a time. Others, presumably, just write 'Why?', which suggest a certain cosmic awareness besides having the merit of brevity."
"'What a treasured possession these books will be for her two sons," says the BBC commentator, who has echoes of Ernest Worthing and the Army Lists. It also summons up the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark and the thousands of tea chests in a dusty unvisited cellar."
"Apparently, similar volumes are to be opened all over the country and it will be possible to analyse regional differences in the degree of mourning."
Bennett, ever the realist, was less than impressed by the widespread mourning for Diana, writing in his diaries:
"'God created a blonde angel and called her Diana.' This is one of the cards on the flowers outside Kensington Palace that the BBC chose to zoom in on. It purports to be from a child, though where one is supposed to be touched by it or (as is my inclination) to throw up isn’t plain."
"HMQ to address the nation tomorrow. I’m only surprised Her Majesty hasn't had to submit to a phone in."
The award-winning playwright, celebrated for his BBC Talking Heads monologues, has always been intrigued by the spectacle of royal pomp and pageantry, writing of the wedding of the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer:
 "Watching the Queen returning from the royal wedding, trying to manage the happy chatting of Earl Spencer on the one hand and acknowledging the frenzy of the crowd with the other, was to detect someone in grave danger of 'flooding out'. And, though it is given to few of us to drive through the streets of London in an open landau to the cheers of a delighted throng, the situation elicited fellow-feeling because it was one we had all at some time or other experienced."
The way the modern royal family play a part as decided for them by the mood of the nation carries into Bennett's work, most notably in The Madness of King George.
Writing after the production was complete, he remarked on how the ending of the film is meant to remind us of the current state of the House of Windsor. The parallels with today's monarchy were largely unsought, but they have become more obvious as the film proceeds, the final shot of St. Paul's Cathedral consciously recalling the television coverage of the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales.
The people behind the crown fascinate all, but most especially those whose life's work documents the wonders of human behaviour.
In Writing Home, Alan Bennett recalls how even one of Britain's most famous TV personalities was in awe of royalty, writing of his great friend, the 1970s and 80s chat show host Russell Harty:
"A couple of years ago he arranged for the Princess of Wales to visit settle and giggleswick. At the end of the visit the Princess offered him a lift back to London in the royal plane. Notwithstanding he had to get into the plane with a plastic bag over his head to evade the attentions of the press, he accepted with alacrity."
"They had both of them got on very well and made each other laugh, and now spent a happy hour chatting as they flew south. Arrived at Northolt, they said goodbye, the Princess sped off to Windsor while Russell flung himself into a taxi and rushed to Heathrow and a plane back."
"He hadn't wanted a lift at all, but just couldn't resist the offer. It was sheer cheek."
 We can only imagine how Bennett views the latest, ongoing reincarnation of the monarchy and the new generation as they integrate more and more with 'normal' people (as today's story about bingo-playing Prince William reveals).
Not everyone may agree with his views but Alan Bennett's diaries offer a telling account of how many monarchists prefer to take their royalty discreetly and in an utterly English way.
Writing Home, a perceptive and at times hilarious collection of prose by Alan Bennett, in which he offers his unique views on the Royal Family, is published by Faber and Faber and is available now from all good bookshops including Amazon UK and Amazon USA.
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Alan Bennett is too easily dismissed as a safe dramatist, never more at home than when he is writing about some domestic setting where the custard creams sit next to commemorative teapots wrapped in their knitted woolen cosies.
