New Arena film from Bafta and Emmy Award-winning director Adam Low celebrates the life and long career of one of our most loved playwrights - Alan Bennett

But then, if you’ve never been in fashion, you’ve never been out of it either.

Not that keeping up with the latest trends is something that bothers a man like Bennett – and that’s how it should be. Instead, he prefers to spend his days writing, reading or tootling around north London on his trusty tricycle; it used to be a push bike, but at 90 (he reached the milestone in May), he can no longer manage that. It’s a concession to old age he’s been forced to make.

National treasure is an overused phrase (and one that Bennett would probably hate), but it’s difficult to think of somebody who deserves it more than him; his work has helped bring Britain’s lonely, disappointed and disaffected to the fore: “I can see that the central figure in a lot of my television plays is the same,” he once told an audience at the British Film Institute. “He’s a vague, rather melancholy, rather troubled figure, not having much fun, and he’s not actually much fun to write, as distinct from the characters surrounding him, who one has a great deal of fun with.”

Bennett has also taught us a thing or two about history via his work as well – as you might expect from somebody who gained a first class degree in the subject from Oxford University.

But he never expected or set out to be famous. The son of a Leeds butcher, he claims that as an adolescent, he thought he’d become a clergyman, merely because he felt he looked like one. He was already a bookish sort – the type of youngster you’d now call a nerd or a geek.

“As a child I read biography and autobiography backwards,” he once claimed. “Looking back I feel I was probably much more middle-aged then than I am now.”

Following National Service, he enrolled at Oxford, where he began performing in comedy sketches. From there he became part of the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe, which also launched the showbusiness careers of Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook.

Bennett became a regular face on the small screen as an actor, although it’s for his plays that he’s now best known, including The History Boys and The Habit of Art. He’s also been prolific on the small and large screens, winning numerous awards in the process, including a Bafta Best Original Screenplay for A Private Function and an Oscar nomination for penning The Madness of King George.

Earlier this year, he published a new book, Killing Time, about life in a home for OAPs. No doubt it will be mentioned during this celebration of his life, which looks back at his many successes while musing on the ageing process.