Talking Heads – episodes 7-12

Another six episodes of Talking Heads. Another six acclaimed actors playing another six anguished individuals, excellently, under the direction of another set of theatrical heavyweights. Another six delicately packaged doses of despair.

Watching all 12 episodes of Nicholas Hytner’s lockdown reboot of Alan Bennett’s classic monologues over two days – they are all available on iPlayer – is a bit like being a Catholic priest in a particularly unfortunate parish. You are bombarded with sad, sordid confessions everywhere you look. Everyone you meet is in denial. Everyone you meet is depressed. Then you go to bed, get up, and do it all over again.

The monologues are, it occurred to me halfway through episode 10, the dramatic equivalent of Richard Yates’ short stories: pint-sized portraits that slowly show, rather than tell, the spectator a character’s fatal flaw. For half an hour or more, in five-minute chunks, they talk directly at you, and by the end you understand their inner workings intimately. That Bennett can couple this with his astute eye for social satire and his sparkling, side-eyed humour is testament to how rare a writer he is, and how much we should treasure him.

And perhaps this second batch of episodes isn’t quite as miserable as the first. In The Hand of God, the worst thing that happens to Kristin Scott Thomas’ antique-dealing Celia is that she lets an original Michelangelo go for only £100 by mistake. Mind you, she is also a recent widow, running a failing business, whose identity now hinges entirely on her eye for quality, so her £5 million-pound error still proves something of an existential threat.

And in The Outside Dog, the worst thing that happens to Rochenda Sandall’s hygiene-obsessed, housebound Marjory is that her abbattoir-worker husband’s Alsatian won’t stop barking when he’s not home. But then, it does transpire pretty quickly that her husband is a serial killer as well as a slaughterman, and that she has been sitting on the evidence of his crimes all along. So she has it pretty bad, too, actually.

Both Scott Thomas and Sandall are superb. The former imbues Celia with an old-school ostentation and a sparkle in her eye that only crystallises into tears at the very conclusion. The latter makes Marjory almost as furiously fierce as the attack-dog chained up outside her house, until the reality of her situation comes crushing down on her.

Both of these episodes are remade versions of Bennett’s second series from 1998, along with episode nine – Nights in the Garden of Spain, in which a prim, gardening-obsessed Tamsin Greig meets a murderer across the street and unexpectedly makes friends with her – and episode eleven – Miss Fozzard Finds Her Feet, in which Maxine Peake plays a lonely department store clerk who enters into an unlikely relationship with her podiatrist, a man who takes foot-care a step too far.