Don’t be fooled, Bennett’s cosy little chats are not for the faint-hearted

WISeLY, martin Freeman did not try to imitate alan Bennett as mother’s boy Graham, the character in Talking Heads (BBC1) that the playwright originally wrote for himself.

I say ‘wisely’, not just because any attempt to mimic Bennett, the poet laureate of the front parlour, is doomed to be a parody — more Spitting Image than homage.

The bigger problem is that Bennett’s querulous Leeds accent is such a cosy sound, perfectly suited to readings from Winnie The Pooh and The Wind In The Willows. It is the eternal voice of Jackanory.

That’s oddly ill-matched to much of the material Bennett has written for television, especially the second batch of Talking Heads that first screened in the nineties.

There’s very little of Tales From The Riverbank in those later vignettes of child abusers, thieves and murderers.

many viewers have felt unsettled by this aspect of the current run of re-makes — commissioned chiefly because these single- handed playlets were ideal for filming under lockdown.

a couple, though, were written last year. One, performed by Sarah Lancashire, was called an Ordinary Woman: the best that can be said about this portrait of a mum lusting after her teenage son is that it explains why Bennett so rarely writes from a parent’s viewpoint — he understands sons perfectly, and mothers not at all.

The narrator of an episode titled a Chip In The Sugar, Graham is the archetypal Bennett son. He’s unmarried, devoted to mam, gay (though he hates to think she might have guessed), fond of churches and racked with depressions. Freeman made him completely believable, a hollowedout shell of a man — his confidence undermined by a bout of mental illness prolonged (though he would never admit it) by his mother’s constant sniping.

Played without Bennett’s trademark simpers and whines, Graham was no longer hopelessly wet. Still, as he sat silently on his bed to unlace his shoes, the actor conveyed a man who had never been happy since he was a boy and never could be again.

The monologue was crammed with expressions unheard since the eighties: ‘all dolled up, lathered in make-up . . . I’ve got a Rover 2000, handles like a dream . . . Is my underskirt showing?’ That’s the Bennett genius, his ability to pluck idioms from memory like a musician who has only to hear a tune once to remember it.

Those turns of phrase preserved in vinegar were mostly missing from the 1998 piece, The Outside Dog, originally filmed with Julie Walters and now remade with Line Of Duty’s

Rochenda Sandall. This was the story of a woman who comes to realise her husband is a serial killer — and it only went to prove Bennett’s instinct is to spot the French fry in a sugar bowl, not the blood-soaked rag hidden in a kennel.

The Hidden Wilds Of The Motorway (BBC4), a 90-minute circuit of the m25 around London in search of animal life, might have benefited from a Wind In The Willows voiceover by Bennett. We found trout in the chalky waters of the River Chess, and watched kestrels hunting at the former moD rifle ranges on Rainham marshes.

Presenter Helen macdonald sometimes got carried away: she compared a graffiti- ridden underpass to a Persian paradise garden, and went into raptures over a concrete house designed by Victorian naturalist alfred Russel Wallace.

Some of the sound was dodgy too but we certainly saw more than most drivers would ever suspect was lurking in the verges.