ROGER LEWIS
Only Alan Bennett characters talk like Alan Bennett: ‘Curtains in orange nylon and no place mats – there’s not even the veneer of civilisation;’ ‘I have a son studying hotel management and a daughter with one kidney;’ ‘I did spearhead the provision of potpourri in the ladies’ toilets.’
His landscape, where old ladies attend Flowers in Felt and Fabric courses at the day centre, knit tea cosies and tick off commissionaires (‘You may only have one arm, Mr Capstick, but that doesn’t entitle you to pat me on the bottom’), is no more the real Leeds or the actual Morecambe sands than Shakespeare’s wood was near Athens.
What struck me, watching the remade Talking Heads (BBC1), was how antiquated it all also is. Despite the jarring, interpolated sprinkling of swear-words and the contemporary-looking kitchens and lounge rooms, where the characters poured tea and stared into space, who in the tangible 21st century names their children Clifford or Maureen, talks about pegging out stockings, has a run round with the Ewbank and puts the jam on a rolling boil?
And it’s a long time since I heard anyone be squeamish about tattoos, men with beards and the hazards of the police wearing glasses: ‘What chance would they have against a determined assailant?’
Much as I revere Bennett for the jokes (‘I don’t want inundating with sausage’) and the perfect use of language (‘Leonard’s been had up for exposing himself in Sainsbury’s doorway. Tesco, you could understand it’), he himself, in these monologues, is more concerned to cook up plots about sexual perversion, incest, paedophilia, alcoholism and murder.
I hadn’t quite grasped, when I saw the playlets originally in the ’80s and ’90s, that these programmes are very dark, revolving as they do around characters who have to mull over treachery and misunderstanding.
A lot of this is to do with the casting – and I’m now trying to decide: Patricia Routledge or Imelda Staunton? Maggie Smith or Lesley Manville? The original actresses were better at finding the comic rhythms, showing an instinctive grasp of the northern camp and of Bennett’s relish of the ridiculous.
In the remakes – fine in their way, if redundant – the actresses gave performances, almost audition pieces, rather than turns. They went for the underlying tragic dimensions, suggested a lot of anger pent-up, rather than resignation; and classic lines from the past (‘The barriers are coming down in chiropody as in everything else’) went for nothing.
Bennett’s works suddenly became, under Nicholas Hytner’s direction, overtly serious or serious-minded. But the characters, by being made more real, as Harriet Walter was less of a caricature than Stephanie Cole, became dreary. Which is fine if you think comedy is frivolous. I felt a lot of unspoken depth and magic had been lost.
Buckets of Baftas will await The Salisbury Poisonings (BBC1), a reconstruction of the attempt by the Russians to assassinate the Skripals. Instead of relying on raw excitement and
a pounding, frantic soundtrack, a panic-stricken, jittery editing and screeching tyres, the trilogy was made much more compelling because everything was calm, measured, unsensational. We saw these local experts, played by Anne-marie Duff and Nigel Lindsay, among others, solve problems, do their jobs and move on to the next phase, step by step, without tantrums or eccentricity.
The drama was intensely dramatic because people wouldn’t give in to the tumult. Porton Down boffins, military personnel, public-health consultants, doctors, nurses and the constabulary – you got a strong sense of civic responsibility. It was a portrait of experts under pressure, coming through.
The programmes were also quite sinister: evensong in the mellow shades of the cathedral, the genteel provincial streets and housing estates, geese in the sky at sunset, all suggesting a world at risk. Doorknobs, car seats and perfume bottles were suddenly charged with danger. How quickly the commonplace can become alien, with officials in white suits and gas masks commandeering buses and public areas, and iron sheeting going up in the shopping precincts.
The third episode was devoted to the death of Dawn Sturgess, who’d spritzed herself with the nerve agent, thinking it was scent. Ron Cook and Stella Gonet were very moving as her parents. Seldom have I seen actors managing to be completely ordinary and subdued as they portrayed raw, palpable sorrow. Rafe Spall, contorted in physical agony as he went down with the poison, was also notable – his character, DS Nick Bailey, was psychologically drained, and we got a strong sense of the man’s fear and fundamental goodness.