Talking Heads (BBC1) 

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SPITTING Image used to portray Alan Bennett as a fussy old Yorkshire dear, forever having tea with Thora Hird and wittering on about summat and nowt. A cross between the Queen Mum and a warm crumpet dripping with butter, that was our Alan.

That must have been why the BBC decided to revive his Talking Heads monologues for these coronavirus times. After all, what could possibly be more comforting than 12 of the UK’s finest actors performing Bennett’s exquisitely crafted, wonderfully funny pieces to camera?

Ah, but what a short memory you have, grandma. As anyone who has seen them will know, Bennett’s monologues are about as cuddly as a bale of barbed wire. Do not be fooled by these ladies, and they are mostly ladies, in their flowery blouses. Here be monsters. And secrets. My God, the secrets. Make your hair curl without perming lotion some of them.

As Nicholas Hytner, who directed three of 12 episodes, put it recently, Bennett’s great gift is that he can get under the skin of people that you would normally run a mile from. This was certainly true of Irene, the subject of A Lady of Letters, the first of two stories shown last night.

Patricia Routledge performed the piece in the first series of monologues which aired in 1988 (a second arrived a decade later). Like Hird, Routledge was a quintessential Bennett heroine. Quite the slippers to fill. Yet Imelda Staunton, and director Jonathan Kent, were in command from the off.

The new series was shot at Elstree, home of EastEnders, because it was one of the few places still open. This turned out to be lucky. Some of the sets on the London soap, like its storylines, ooze misery, and as such they provided an ideal home for Talking Heads.

We met Irene sitting at a table, looking out at the street. Net curtains on the window, the better for twitching, and a lace cloth on the table. She told us about a funeral she had just been to. An acquaintance.

“She lost her mother around the time I lost mine. She had a niece in Australia and I had the one cousin in Canada. Then she went in for gas-fired central heating just a few weeks before I did. So one way and another we covered a lot of the same ground.”

Immediately, it felt like you knew this woman. Maybe you were this woman (or feared becoming her). Such was the spare brilliance of Bennett’s writing.

Irene, as the title suggested, liked to wield her fountain pen and block of Basildon Bond. Putting the world right one letter of complaint at a time was her thing. She was now concerned about the new couple across the road, and in particular their child. Irene had seen bruises on the youngster. Lately, she had not seen the child around at all.

Even if you remembered the tale from the first time around the twist was still a punch in the guts. Staunton was not Routledge, no-one ever could be, but she was perfect in her own way, her face a fist of bitterness and disappointment with life.

She more than passed the up close and personal acting test. In the original Talking Heads the camera was 18 inches away from the actor. The technique, Bennett has explained, was devised by director Stuart Burge as a way to “rob the camera of its menace”. Here the camera went both close and wide, with a skeleton crew the regulation two metres away. The effect, sheer intensity, was the same.

Next was Sarah Lancashire in An Ordinary Woman. Directed by Hytner, this was one of two new half hour monologues, written last year but not performed on the screen.

Lancashire played a “nice, middle-aged lady” with a nice big kitchen, a nice family, boy and a girl. But snuggled within all this niceness was a shocking secret, the divulging of which proved disastrous. Even more than A Lady of Letters, this was watch through the fingers material, genuinely disturbing in parts, more so because it was the brilliant Lancashire playing the role. Raquel has come a long way from Coronation Street.

Two sharp, powerful pieces of drama, performed in just the right tones. Laugh out loud funny, besides. Bennett’s comedy cartwheeled along, the dialogue full of absurdities and apparent randomness. Light among the darkness, diamonds in the coal bucket, or was it broken glass? That’s Bennett. That's Talking Heads.

Next episode Thursday, 7.30pm. Series available on iPlayer