A national treasure

Mr Bennett, who plans to take over the theatre at the North Oxford public school on Monday, is one of the most recognised writers of his generation.

Indeed, he has been colouring our lives with his stories and plays since the 1960s when he joined forces with Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook and achieved instant fame with the satirical revue Beyond The Fringe.

His work has infiltrated our lives to such an extent that some go as far as describing him as the nation's favourite teddy bear, and our national treasure.

He has certainly remained a household name since the sixties.

But why is a man who admits feeling no nostalgia for Oxford - despite being a scholarship boy who gained a first in history - giving his time freely to help raise funds for a theatre built within the grounds of one of Oxford's most prestigious schools?

The answer is simple. Mr Bennett is performing at the North Wall at the request of his life-long friend, the composer George Fenton, and because of the many exciting community-based projects Mr Fenton has initiated that will be taking place at the North Wall during the summer The friends first met in 1968, when Mr Bennett offered him a part in his play Forty Years On.

It was Mr Bennett's first West End play and starred Sir John Gielgud, who played the headmaster of a British public school.

Mr Fenton played one of the 20 schoolboys integral to the plot. Perhaps Mr Fenton would have remained an actor if directors during those early days had not asked him to play an instrument.

Even though he was an almost entirely self-taught musician, he gave up thoughts of acting and made music his main focus, going on to write numerous music scores for films such as Gandhi, Cry Freedom, A Handful of Dust, Shadowlands and more recently the music for Mr Bennett's award-winning The History Boys.

Mr Bennett says he adores Mr Fenton's music, and feels he does not get enough recognition for the huge contribution he has made over the years.

He sees him as a very modest man, and the very best kind of collaborator as he can read a play and immediately feel what is required, which is something many musicians cannot do.

As Mr Fenton went to St Edward's School and is now a school governor and one of the driving forces behind the £4m North Wall theatre project, asking Mr Bennett to help raise funds by staging An Evening with Alan Bennett was a natural extension of their friendship.

Speaking on the telephone from his home in Camden, Mr Bennett said that despite his preference for Cambridge he does visit Oxford from time to time, but perhaps not as often as he should.

Over the years he has taken part in charity events for The Oxford Playhouse and the Bodleian Library and Exeter College, but has never visited St Edward's School.

"When George explained that all funds raised would go towards funding groups of young people who would be given the chance to work in a professional theatrical environment, of course I agreed. It's good to help raise funds for a worthwhile project," he said, adding that as he was not engrossed in any large projects at the moment, the event would not disrupt his working day.

The evening will take the form of a reading from his latest publication Untold Stories (Faber & Faber, £9.99), which won the PEN/Ackerley Prize for Autobiography in 2006 and is rich in references to his time at Oxford, both as a student and later when he stayed on to research medieval history.

It is in his Untold Stories that Mr Bennett admits his first disappointment with Oxford came when he arrived at Exeter College and discovered he was going to have to share a room.

The thought of getting his own room excited him as he had never had a room of his own before. While living at home he had shared with his brother, and his two years' national service were spent in various barrack rooms.

Excited at the prospect of a room that he could arrange as he wanted, he had invested in a length of hand-blocked wallpaper which he believed would stamp his identity on the space.

Yes, Mr Bennett recognised the eccentricity of such a purchase: "Few freshmen undergraduates arrive at college, I imagine, with a single roll of wallpaper under their arm, but I did. But it was all to no purpose. Finding I had to share meant that my precious wallpaper would have to wait."

Having been told he would share with someone with whom he had intermittently shared a barrack room for much of his two years in the army, Mr Bennett came away thinking, 'well, I'm here for three years and that's put paid to the first year."

It did not, of course.

He ended up staying at Oxford for not three, but eight years, and did eventually get a room of his own during his second year at Exeter.

Actually he was given not one, but a set of rooms, under the eaves of the front quad that looked out at the back over Exeter's garden and the walls of the Divinity School.

It was on the chimney breast of this room that he hung his roll of hand-blocked wallpaper.

Other items he used to make the room his own included a small, coloured self-portrait he had painted which has survived to this day, a red lacquer tea caddy, a Staffordshire dog and a few record sleeves to decorate the walls.

He admits he was not a joiner of things. His time in Oxford passed without him becoming a member of the Oxford Union, an actor in OUDS or a writer for Isis, the student magazine. Instead, Mr Bennett led a thoroughly domesticated life within the environment of his college.

After taking his degree, Mr Bennett stayed on at Oxford to research medieval history. He taught a little, too, and having left his rooms at Exeter, moved into Merton Street, where his aim was to make his room warm and cosy. He did not hang wallpaper in these rooms.

When asked what achievements connected to Oxford he was most proud of, Mr Bennett speaks warmly of Exeter College: "I gained great pleasure from being offered an honorary fellowship at Exeter in 1987. I went back to Exeter last year to talk to the undergraduates and was very proud of that too."

However, when the university offered him an honorary doctorate he declined, on the grounds that ever since the establishment of the Rupert Murdoch Chair in Language and Communication, he had felt disaffected with the university.

He believed Murdoch was not a name with which Oxford should have associated itself.

He turned down the offer of a CBE in the 1988 Birthday Honours for services to literature, too, on the grounds that he wanted nothing to do with an award which came from a Government headed by Margaret Thatcher.

On being offered a knighthood in 1996, he refused again. "I felt that being a knight would be akin to wearing a suit every day of my life," said the man who is known for his casual mode of dress and most particularly the duffel coat he wore constantly during his Beyond The Fringe days.

Speaking generally about awards and prizes, he said they did not really help a writer much.

"Take The History Boys, for example, it has been an enormous success, but it leaves me questioning just what I am going to do next."

Naturally, Mr Bennett will be taking questions from the floor when he appears at the North Wall Theatre on Monday. He says he does not think questions from an Oxford audience will differ much from the ones he gets asked in other parts of the country.

"Most people want to know how a writer fills his day. They want to know how I work, do I do regular hours, that sort of thing and I am sometimes asked about the mechanics behind Talking Heads. There's no answer to things like that."

Mr Bennett also anticipates questions about his award-winning The History Boys, which he says was in some sense an outcome of those two crucial examinations he took, first to get into Oxford and then later when he sat for his degree.

He has received so many accolades for this play that compliments about this remarkable work appear to embarrass him. He has heard them all before.

However, he is prepared to answer questions about the play, particularly that final scene in The History Boys, when the ten boys disclose exactly what they have done with their lives and we learn that none of them has reached his potential or appears to be fulfilled. They are, in fact, slightly disillusioned.

"No one," says Mr Mr Bennett, "ends up where they want to be - that's the way it is."

• To attend An Evening with Alan Bennett on Monday, tickets at £50 each can be reserved by ringing Nick Quarterly on 01865 319452. The evening begins at 7pm with a champagne reception and concludes with a book signing and drinks at 9.30pm.

All funds raised will go towards a programme of summer events which will help those who would not normally get a chance, the opportunity to take part in courses on music, theatre and film.