seen 14 November 2015
The film concerns Miss Shepherd, who lived in a van in the street where Alan Bennett lived in Camden Town. Eventually, in a quixotic gesture prompted partly by exasperation with the disturbance of witnessing several uncalled for attacks on her, and partly because new parking restrictions would render her roadside position untenable, he suggested that she park her van in his driveway, an arrangement which lasted for 15 years until Miss Shepherd died.
Alan Bennett wrote an account of the peculiar relationship between himself, a private and rather timid writer, and this indomitable woman, about whom he knew virtually nothing, as she rarely volunteered personal information. This account first appeared in various editions of the London Review of Books, and was finally published as a book, and then turned by him into a play, in which he cunningly split his own persona into two acting parts - one for the person to whom the events happened and one for the writer observing it all.
