Based on her own novel and its resultant theatrical production, Helene Hanff did write tons of TV movies and series in the fifties, later this novel (1970) and others less well known. It's a good screenplay - Hugh Whitemore.
The bus - for those bus enthusiasts amongst us - is apparently a 1949 Bedford OB, which also featured in
Foyle's War and
Marple: The Blue Geranium.
Hopkins and Bancroft are both marvellous - Hopkins being one of the most internal actors I think there's ever been. With Judi Dench, Jean de Baer, Maurice Denham, Eleanor David, Mercedes Ruehl, Ian McNeice, Connie Booth (spotted by Eagle-Eye Q). Bancroft's husband Mel Brooks was an exec producer.
I liked 'He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven':
"Had I the heaven's embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light;
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."
(W.B. Yeats.)
