Locked-down watching

Panic must have set in at the BBC in April. How to fill the schedules in a new world of social distancing, empty stadia and shut-up shops? Re-runs? Zoom extravaganzas? And yes, even better, monologues!

Talking Heads was the perfect lockdown solution, taking ten award-winning monologues from the 1980s and 90s, adding well-known but unoccupied actors and directors (Imelda Staunton, Tamsin Greig and Martin Freeman, amongst others), and borrowing the vacant EastEnders set. The final touch was to persuade national treasure Alan Bennett to write another two scripts – bingo! More than six hours of primetime TV.

The format of each episode is very simple. A character speaks to camera in seven or eight short scenes, often filmed in the one room or house, changes of light or costume indicating the passage of time. Gradually, a story is unfolded and secrets are revealed. Leeds is the setting for all, and frequent references to the locality, as well as precise physical detail, add to the wry humour that runs throughout, as well as to the small-world realism – isn’t this how most of our lives are constructed, and indeed how we often talk?

Miss Fozzard describes her choice of yellow peep-toe sandals, which hadn’t had ‘an airing since last summer when I had a little run over to Whitby’; Irene picks up her pen, ‘her trusty friend’ which ‘mother bought me the last time she was able to get over to Harrogate’. We might ask if there is a trace of patronising snobbery, or even misogyny, in the way Bennett presents the preoccupations of these mostly working-and lower-middle-class women (the two men seem to stand out as having rather different voices), and certainly there is much in the naiveté and formality that is dated – and was perhaps dated even when they were first broadcast. Yet still he does treat his characters with a kindness and warmth, for all their small-mindedness, and even views their sins with compassion.

More bitter than sweet

And there is sin. Sometimes in the speaker, often in their family, and mostly of a sexual nature, with deviance increasing with the date of the episode, culminating in An Ordinary Woman, written in 2020, which deals with incestuous desire. It does not make for comfortable viewing at all. As with the other stories, desires or crimes are hidden or repressed, and sometimes only implied. This proximity of incidental detail and tidy-mindedness to the pain of discovery or guilt creates an unsettling sadness in Talking Heads’. Tragedy and disgrace are tightly packaged into the everyday lives of these isolated, restrained people. We see, however, that most of the characters just carry on. There are no histrionics, very little self-pity, and mostly little self-awareness, which perhaps adds to the dated feel. In Her Big Chance, the aspiring actress, played by Jodie Comer, doesn’t seem to realise that the film she congratulates herself for landing a part in is soft-porn, nor does she understand quite how she ends up in bed with men. The bitter-sweet irony is perhaps more bitter than sweet.

It is interesting that in a good number of these episodes there is a vicar, one who, it is implied, should understand or help, but who often comically fails. The other confidantes or counsellors who appear, also fail. And so the protagonist is left with us as their audience, impotent and passive, hearing their confession. Though there may be a couple of happier endings, Bennett ultimately presents us with a bleak vision of human isolation, unadorned with 21st-century over-optimism about therapy or self-actualisation.

Surely, then, he’s right that humans often tragically fail to understand themselves, that we fail to listen to each other, that desire is powerful and that its repression, as well as its expression, can destroy. Bennett is right about the snobberies and vanities we cling to. But Christians have to add that we are not alone. There is someone listening who cares about the little, tiny details which are so very big to us. He will listen to our guilt and our grief. He is powerfully present and so we don’t have to choose between self-repression and self-indulgence. He will put it right in the end.