Talking Heads
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About the Author
It's hard to pigeonhole Alan Bennett, and correspondingly easy to undervalue his achievements. Although one of the most recognisable writers of his generation, his unassumingly owlish persona and fondness for self-deprecation has created the impression of a lovably eccentric minor talent, whose amusingly droll plays about elderly Northern women (typically played by Thora Hird) and fusspot secretaries (Patricia Routledge) are merely one step up from sitcom. The idea that he might be the most important and innovative British television playwright since Dennis Potter initially seems laughable.
But it's hard to think of a stronger contender. His prolific output has stretched to nineteen individual television plays, four television series and three cinema films, together with numerous stage works, short stories, assorted journalism and his inimitable diaries. An Englishman Abroad and the two Talking Heads series are ranked amongst British television's greatest achievements, and he is widely recognised as the master of the television monologue.
Born on 9 May 1934 in Armley, Leeds, the son of a butcher, Bennett grew up surrounded by gossiping Yorkshire women, which made an indelible impression on him, as did regular holidays to coastal resorts like Morecambe. His first encounter with comedy was via the radio, but he later said that he disliked popular comedians like Tommy Handley and Tommy Trinder for being 'relentlessly cheerful': more down-to-earth figures like ITMA's appropriately-named charlady Mona Lott were closer to his already ruefully melancholic outlook.
Winning an Oxford scholarship, he spent the 1950s preparing for a career as a medieval historian, until his increasing fondness for appearing on stage culminated in a legendary collaboration with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller. Beyond the Fringe (1960), did more than anything else to revolutionise British satire, moving it from Goonish surrealism towards pointed, often controversial political comment.
Post-Fringe, he contributed to BBC sketch shows Not So Much A Programme, More A Way Of Life and BBC-3 and played the Dormouse in Jonathan Miller's imaginative adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, before writing the sketch show On the Margin his first solo effort for television. Despite much acclaim, virtually all of it is lost thanks to the BBC's notorious tape-conservation policies.
His first television play, A Day Out, was filmed by Stephen Frears who would direct and/or produce the majority of Bennett's television work over the next decade. It and Sunset Across the Bay were wistful, elegiac pieces, with Bennett drawing on his Yorkshire roots for the first time in his portraits of, respectively, a Halifax cycling club in 1911 and an elderly couple (based on his parents) retiring to Morecambe but feeling indelibly homesick for Leeds.
His major television breakthrough was with the LWT series of Six Plays by Alan Bennett. Although he would publish five of these scripts under the title The Writer in Disguise, there was little overt autobiography, but much delving into recurring preoccupations, be they shyness and loneliness (Me! I'm Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Afternoon Off), office minutiae (Doris and Doreen, One Fine Day), the limited appeal of Northern seaside towns (Afternoon Off, All Day on the Sands), family alienation (Me! I'm Afraid of Virginia Woolf, One Fine Day, All Day on the Sands) and a foreboding sense of impending doom (Doris and Doreen, The Old Crowd). The play that garnered most attention, much of it strongly negative, was The Old Crowd, an unusually experimental piece for mainstream British television, though much of its confrontational style came from director and uncredited co-writer Lindsay Anderson.
Bennett returned to the BBC for his second cycle of plays, given the collective title Objects of Affection. These showed a deepening concern for the lives of ordinary people, whether the dying fathers in Intensive Care and Rolling Home, the slow-witted Our Winnie, the unemployed teenager and his mother in Marks, or the elderly couple and naïve social worker in Say Something Happened. As before, one piece stood out for stylistic innovation, the monologue A Woman of No Importance, with Patricia Routledge inaugurating what may be Bennett's most lasting television monument.
The mid-1980s saw several one-off scripts, often about real-life figures such as Guy Burgess (An Englishman Abroad), Franz Kafka (The Insurance Man) and Joe Orton (Prick Up Your Ears, d. Stephen Frears, 1987). The last of these was Bennett's second cinema screenplay: his first, A Private Function (d. Malcolm Mowbray, 1984) revisited the post-war Yorkshire of his boyhood in a story of food rationing and unlicensed pig smuggling.
But it was Talking Heads which lifted Bennett's television writing onto an altogether higher plane. The title was inspired by the adage that "talking heads" made bad television, but the end result comprehensively countered it, with Thora Hird, Maggie Smith, Stephanie Cole, Julie Walters, Patricia Routledge and Bennett himself painting unforgettable portraits of damaged lives and thwarted expectations. It took less than a decade for them to appear on the A-level syllabus, cementing their modern classic status.
That same year the BBC broadcast Dinner at Noon, a documentary that was his most autobiographical piece to date. Although notoriously wary of the media (fuelled by horror at the way the tabloids hounded his friend Russell Harty as he lay dying in hospital), he would gradually reveal more personal information via carefully-selected diary extracts, published first in the London Review of Books and then collated in the surprise best-seller Writing Home (1994). Turning down requests for a more extensive documentary portrait, he made a three-part personal tribute to Westminster Abbey (The Abbey, BBC, 1995) and a series of ten short television monologues, Telling Tales (BBC, 2000) which offered the most vivid reminiscences of his childhood and parents to date.
Throughout his career, he also wrote extensively for the stage, his greatest success being The Madness of George III (1992), the title role incarnated by a heart-rending Nigel Hawthorne. Bennett himself adapted it for the cinema, and, scenting its American backers' preference for a major star, made it a contractual condition that both Hawthorne and director Nicholas Hytner be retained. The slightly retitled The Madness of King George (1994) was a critical and commercial triumph, with Hawthorne and Bennett receiving Oscar nominations.
Since then, Bennett's output has been relatively sparse, and in 2001 he complained that he was suffering from writer's block. His most substantial work from this period was the second series of Talking Heads (BBC, 1998), which cast Bennett veterans Thora Hird, Patricia Routledge and Julie Walters with newcomers Eileen Atkins, Penelope Wilton and David Haig, the latter playing a self-justifying paedophile.
Although Talking Heads 2 was unusually bleak for Bennett, his work is generally darker, harsher and more satirically barbed than his 'national treasure' status and peerless ear for the eccentricities of Yorkshire dialect and workplace gossip would suggest. Often, what looks like endearing shyness is closer to full-blown paranoia (Kafka is a character in two plays, and his shadow looms over several more), with family life either fractious or awkwardly silent, his elderly characters often facing a lonely, neglected death.
His ability to get under the skin of such withdrawn people and write about them with such empathy, compassion and wry (often gallows) humour makes him not just a great writer but the definitive chronicler of a certain kind of English ordinariness, whose outwardly placid surface conceals inner turmoil as intense as anything displayed by the more emotionally articulate.
