In 1988, Alan Bennett wrote and narrated a documentary for the BBC about the Crown Hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire, a hotel with a reputation for gentility. His introduction to the published transcript explains that though Dinner at Noon "was meant to illustrate some of the work of the American sociologist Erving Goffman," the result owed more to autobiography than to sociology per se (WH, 30). However, it's clear to any reader of the script that Goffman's dramaturgical framework provides the underpinning for the commentary. When Bennett describes the role that hotels played in his youth, he calls them "theatres of humiliation" (32) because of his family's sense that they were trespassers-not moneyed or "educated" enough (his mother's explanation) to execute the mannered rituals of hotels and their attendant restaurants. He recalls some of these initial childhood experiences as formative lessons in not belonging, of never having the proper script for the part he is attempting to play outside the safe confines of lower-middle-class Leeds:

When I was little my parents didn't have much money, and when we went into cafes the drill was for my Mam and Dad to order a pot of tea for two, and maybe a token cake, and my brother and me would be given sips of tea from their cup, while under the table my mother unwrapped a parcel of bread and butter that she'd brought from home, and she smuggled pieces to my brother and me, which we had to eat while the waitress wasn't looking. The fear of discovery, exposure and ignominious expulsion stayed with me well into my twenties, and memories of that and similar embarrassments come back whenever I stay in a hotel. (32)

What Bennett calls his parents' "drill" is the kind of protective covering of respectable behavior that we find in many of Bennett's northern plays. Characters cling to tried-and-true formulas of acting that shield them from a world they suspect, usually correctly, is hostile to their ordinariness, or at least prefers to ignore them as if they were embarrassments. The Bennett family motto, he tells us, was "let's pretend we're like everyone else" (40). In other words, don't let on that we don't share the scripts that all other families supposedly model their actions on.