Nowt to say on Talking Heads, insists Bennett

FOR anyone studying Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads as part of the schools curriculum, a new series of BBC adaptations will be a welcome learning aid.

But don’t approach the writer himself. Bennett has said students shouldn’t ask him about any “inner meaning” because he has no idea what it is.

After Talking Heads was televised in 1987, it became part of the A-level syllabus, leading to students “wanting a lowdown on the text”, he told Radio Times.

“Some of them, it was plain, thought that writing to the author was a useful way of getting their homework done for them. Others were more serious, genuinely feeling that I could give them some clues as to the inner meaning of what I had written. I fell in with very few of these requests, generally sending a postcard saying their ideas about the monologues were as good as mine and they should treat me like a dead author who was thus unavailable for comment.”

He said that a playwright is not the best person to talk about his own work as “he is often unaware of what he has written”. Talking Heads is being revived on BBC One with a new cast.

When Howard Hawks was making the intricately plotted Big Sleep he cabled the author of the book, Raymond Chandler, asking him to explain who had murdered the chauffeur Owen Taylor. Chandler said he didn’t know. Or so the story went. There is some suspicion that Chandler did know but expected his screenplay colleagues to work it out. So when, as Alan Bennett has now revealed, he was reluctant to tell A-level candidates what his Talking Heads were about, he is to be congratulated. He had already done his best to express his conscious or unconscious thoughts dramatically. He was like a painter who has used every ounce of effort to put his meaning on canvas open for all to see. As with a Rembrandt portrait, television viewers have the pleasure of working out Talking Heads for themselves.