Essential Viewing
UK
Short Television Film
Director: Stephen Frears
Writer: Alan Bennett
Cinematographer: Ray Henman
Composer: David Fanshawe
Cast: John Normington, James Cossins, Philip Locke, David Waller, Don McKillop, Bernard Wrigley, David Hill, Paul Greenwood, Paul Shane, Brian Glover, Paul Rosebury
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Alan Bennett’s warm, sensual, and deeply moving first television film, which proves to be everything that Renoir’s Partie de Campagne (1936) promised to be but generally wasn’t, follows a Halifax men’s cycling club’s excursion to Fountains Abbey in the Yorkshire countryside on an idyllic May Sunday in 1911, depicting a gentle, optimistic time when talk of brotherhood and socialism still seemed possible. Iain.Stott
