Alan Bennett's Talking Heads

Haven't watched them all yet, but happy to recommend already. Just watched Harriet Walter and cannot fault a moment of her performance. How refreshing to watch something that relies on words and performance.

Enjoyed a few of these, but they were a little too long and a little dated. For Example, Jodie Comer (Episode 4) performed superbly, but her talking about "Crossroads" on the tv when she clearly wouldn't have been born, could have been updated to Corrie or Eastenders. Excellent all the same, except for Jodie's Accent changes, which were All Over the Place!

Stunning!

Martin Freeman is awesome in "A chip in the sugar" but Imelda Staunton is sublime in "A lady of letters". Every aspiring actor hoping to win an audition should study this episode as a guide to what acting is.

Alan Bennett is a national treasure. His writing is prosaic but at the same time stunningly beautiful.

I did feel a little uncomfortable with some of the subject matter but Bennett takes no prisoners... life is what life is.

A series of no-brainers led to the belated rebirth of Alan Bennett's seminal TV monologues series "Talking Heads" in the era of the pandemic. After a quick whip-round and you get some of the finest British actors of the modern era and reduced production crews almost doing a "greatest hits" run through on the hauntingly empty sets of Eastenders.

So - not much new here materialwise and mainly of interest for a series of powerful performances - only some cod northern accents spoil the fun but no one is below excellent and I was particularly moved by both Jodie Comer and Tamsin Greig. The best is still undoubtedly the evergreen Lady of Letters performed by the superlative Imelda Staunton. Of the two "new" ones written in 2019, An Ordinary Woman is rather too disturbingly incestuous to even be engaging and The Shrine is unexpectedly touching and majestically done by Monica Dolan. They hardly feel out of step with the originals, either way.

In British culture the Alan Bennett monologue is a well-trodden presentation - and the sparse magnetism and sharp writing is dulled somewhat by how chokingly regimented the single-person narratives have to be. The very slow zoom. The sitting down and fondling a teacup. Those constant fades to black. It's difficult to make it seem or feel dynamic and in the era of experimental TV anthologies like Inside No. 9 or Room 104 settling in for half an hour of stiff theater can be rather tedious.

However - given the times we are in, no-brainer or not, it does feels very apt and in these loooong barely edited performances you do get to really appreciate just how skilled these actors are, it's just a shame the majority aren't the first ones to read it.

Not having seen the original Talking Heads that debuted over 30 years ago, I was keen to watch this special pandemic rendition of Talking Heads which revived 10 of the episodes from series 1 and 2. Alan Bennett wrote 2 new ones pre-pandemic. The tone is subtle yet searing at times. Some episodes work better than others, but still worth watching.

Hopefully it won't take another pandemic for Alan to bring back Talking Heads for another series. I'd like to see Danny Dyer, any of the Harry Potter stars, any of the Spice Girls, Ant or Dec make an appearance in a new series.