Alan Bennett's Talking Heads

Alan Bennett wrote the first Talking Heads for the BBC in 1988: six people, six rooms, each talking to the camera for half an hour about a life going wrong while they watched. Thirty-two years on, the BBC has remade ten of the originals and added two new pieces, shot in the spring of 2020 on the sets of EastEnders while the rest of television was dark. The cast is the kind you could not assemble in an ordinary year. The writing has held. Taken one a night, which is how they were built to be taken, this is good television and sometimes better than that; taken in a run, you start to see the hinges.

Imelda Staunton’s Irene Ruddock is the one to start with. Patricia Routledge played her in 1988 as a busybody you could pity; Staunton plays her as a woman who enjoys the harm she does, pen in hand, lips pressed, and the laughs stop earlier than they used to. We were frightened of her, which we had not expected to be, and the thing that did it was the pleasure on her face as she licks an envelope. Martin Freeman has the harder job in A Chip in the Sugar, because Bennett played Graham himself, and Freeman sensibly does not attempt the voice. He gives Graham a tight, pleased little smile every time his mother lets him down, and it is enough.

Jodie Comer takes on Lesley in Her Big Chance, which was Julie Walters’s part, and she is the best thing in the twelve. Lesley is an actress with a role in a film she has not read properly, and Comer plays every line of her self-regard straight, so that we hear what is being done to her and she does not. We laughed at her a good deal and then felt we had been unkind, which is exactly what Bennett intended. Lesley Manville’s Susan, the vicar’s wife in Bed Among the Lentils, was Maggie Smith’s part in 1988, and Manville makes it her own inside five minutes by playing the drink rather than the wit. Harriet Walter’s Muriel, in Soldiering On, is a widow coping beautifully, which in Bennett is never good news.

The two new monologues are a mixed pair. The Shrine gives Monica Dolan a woman whose husband has died on his motorbike and who takes to tidying the verge where it happened. It moved us more than we had bargained for, chiefly through what Dolan does with her hands when she talks about the flowers other people have left. An Ordinary Woman gives Sarah Lancashire a mother and a premise we will not set out, and it is the one piece where Bennett seems to have begun with the shock rather than the person. Lancashire does everything that can be done with it. It is still the episode we would skip.

There is not much production to speak of, and that is right. Each piece is a kitchen, a lounge or a bedroom, dressed to the character, and the camera mostly sits and looks. The seven directors come from the theatre, Nicholas Hytner among them, and the best of them know that the cut is the only instrument they have: the picture goes to black, time has passed, the face comes back a little worse. Where it goes wrong, someone has got nervous and started pushing in or drifting to the window, as though a face were not enough. It usually is.

The trouble with a run of twelve is the shape. Bennett’s second series, in 1998, went darker than the first, and several of these pieces take a turn in the second half that we will not describe. Seen once, in their own year, they were a slap. Seen back to back they become a device, and we caught ourselves waiting for the trap-door rather than listening to the person standing on it. The complaint that some of the turns now feel cheap is fair about two of them. For the rest, the turn only confirms what the face has been telling us for twenty minutes.

The certificate is 18, which may surprise anyone who remembers the originals as teatime viewing; the language is mild and the subject matter is not. Watch them one at a time, in the evening, with the phone in another room. The ones built on spite and the ones built on grief both need a night’s sleep between them.