There’s not much point pretending to be an expert on Elgar (or so The Bluffer’s Guide to Music assures us) because everyone already thinks they are. And there’s definitely no point getting hung up on the historical accuracy (or otherwise) of Alan Bennett and Nicholas Hytner’s new film The Choral . It’s set in a West Riding mill town during World War One and the plot pivots around the local choral society’s performance of The Dream of Gerontius . This being Bennett, of course, there’s rather more to it than that, but in any case – spoiler alert, and there’ll be more – Sir Edward himself makes a cameo appearance: Simon Russell Beale, looking oddly like the late Ken Russell in a white fright-wig.

So here we go again: imaginative fiction collides with historical reality. Playwrights and

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