Miss Pym's Day Out

 Last night BBC4 showed an old edition of Bookmark, Miss Pym's Day Out, a 1992 film by James Runcie which dramatised Barbara Pym's visit to London to attend the Booker Prize dinner in 1977. Her late masterpiece Quartet in Autumn had been shortlisted – a sign of how thoroughly her literary reputation had been restored following her 14 years in the unpublished wilderness and her 1977 'rediscovery' triggered by Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil (who both named her as the most underrated writer of the century). The film follows her as she makes her way from her home in the Oxfordshire village of Finstock to London, where she gamely endures an interview, meets various dignitaries and fans, sits through the dinner, and discovers that, of course, she hasn't won. Miss Pym's Day Out is so rich in quotations from, allusions to and glimpsed scenes from the novels that the Barbara Pym Society helpfully detailed them all in a scene by scene synopsis. The film is made in something close to documentary or cinema verité style, and various people appear as themselves – Jilly Cooper, publisher Tom Maschler, A.N. Wilson, Penelope Lively, and indeed Barbara's sister Hilary. Also present, but played by an actor, is Philip Larkin, who was chairman of the Booker judges that year – but was he rooting for Barbara to win? No, he was not: indeed, he declared he would jump out of a window if Paul Scott's Staying On didn't win. And the winner was... Staying On. 
  Introduced by its star, Patricia Routledge, Miss Pym's Day Out should be available on the BBC iPlayer.