Alan Silitoe at the Broadway

After Lawrence I suppose Alan Silitoe must be Nottingham's most famous writer so it was pretty much obligatory to go and see him in conversation at The Broadway followed by the film of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. At 80 he cut a sprightly and dapper figure full of good humour and interesting anecdotes.

The story of how Saturday Night and Sunday Morning came to be written was startlingly at variance with the image in my own mind. I had Silitoe scribbling by candlelight in a back-to-back Radford terrace after a hard days grind at his lathe. The truth is that he received a handsome pension from the air-force at the age of 21 and retired to Majorca to write among the orange groves.

It must be twenty years since I last saw the film and what struck me on this occasion is that I never previously noticed what a superb piece of cinema it actually is.