Such a tableau makes it all too tempting in this siloed age to put Bennett into his own well-worn category of Yorkshire Best. After a 65-year career, however, he resists such confinement. In Alan Bennett: 90 Years On, he tells us that he has no time for Yorkshire of the “ee-by-gum” variety now in vogue. Instead, he delights in its less obvious offerings, what he calls the backwards, grudging credit of “that’s not a bad-looking woman” or “he’s bright enough”.

They say you should write of what you know. As a working-class northerner outgunning posher folk at Oxford, and a closeted gay man at a time when homosexuality was still illegal, Bennett learned what it is to be an outsider. His early success with the 1960s comedy stage revue Beyond the Fringe opened the door for him to dip a toe into the establishment, and it’s this half-in, half-out stance that has fuelled his remarkable canon, criticising institutions like the Church of England, the monarchy and the security services since long before it became fashionable to do so.

Talking Heads was a love letter to the female figures of his youth

He often returns to the subject of education. His 2004 play The History Boys, later a successful film, is now noted for featuring a cast including future stars such as Dominic Cooper, Russell Tovey and James Corden. For all that, though, I urge you to watch it again on iPlayer. Over the course of 108 minutes, it tells us everything we need know about class, loneliness among the herd and the value of learning. Bennett could be describing his own enduring gift to us in one line he gives to Richard Griffiths’s English tutor, Hector: “The best moments in reading are when you come across something you thought special, particular to you, and here it is set down by someone else… and it’s as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”

There is similar compassion in many more of Bennett’s scripts, on subjects ranging from pigs (A Private Function) to palaces (A Question of Attribution), and no conversation about the writer is complete without reference to his Talking Heads monologues, even if, refreshingly, he says he has nothing further to say about them, that everything he intended is in the work.

With deceptively light strokes of the pen, his acute ear for conversation and his empathy in full flight, Bennett brought to life a group of women held dear but often overlooked on screen. Funny, perceptive and poignant, Talking Heads was a love letter to the strong female figures of his youth and puts paid to any argument that only the “authentic lived experience” is valid for creativity.

If Talking Heads written by a man would have difficulty being commissioned these days, Hector from The History Boys would surely be cancelled before the ink had dried. In 2024, the worldly students’ pathetically desiring teacher would be deemed “predatory”, or “problematic” if the critics were feeling kind.

But that would be to confine Bennett’s view, his sympathy for a closeted, non-aggressive, poetic man who he admits isn’t dissimilar to his early self, to the past, rather than to embrace contradiction in the here and now.

That includes Bennett himself. These days, he belongs to north London as much as to North Yorkshire, even if it’s in the charity shops of the latter you’re more likely to find him. Alan Bennett’s greatest achievement is his universal reminder that none of us is just one thing.