Talking Heads: The Shrine

BBC1

****

RIGHT, as of last night we have run out of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads. It is as sure a sign as any that lockdown is heading for the exit and life can return to what passes for normal.

No more doleful housewives, their sorrows wrapped in pastel cardigans and swathed in pithy sayings, enough Yorkshire yammering for now.

But by ‘eck we shall miss these monologues. Which is not something listeners to The Archers are saying. Like BBC television executives, those in charge of the everyday story of country folk turned to monologues to fill the gap when normal radio business was suspended.

Alas, The Archers experiment, unlike the remakes of Bennett’s originals, has not ended happily, with fans complaining they cannot take any more droning on. One complained to the Radio Times this week that she found the “endless” monologues “not just tedious but oddly unpleasant”.

Not an easy business, monologues. That Talking Heads made them appear so is down to Bennett’s peerless brilliance in the form.

Added to this were some of the best actors of today giving their all, each one knowing that previous greats had sat where they were perched, rolling perfectly turned lines around their mouths like so many quarters of mint imperials. Gone were Patricia Routledge, Julie Walters and Bennett himself, but in their places came Martin Freeman, Jodie Comer and Imelda Staunton, to name but a few.

Monica Dolan, star of The Shrine, the 12th and final episode, is perhaps not as well kent a name as Sarah Lancashire, who helmed the series’ only other new work, An Ordinary Woman, but you will have known the face. Dolan was Jeremy Thorpe’s wife Marion in A Very English Scandal, and Welsh BBC press officer Tracy Pritchard in W1A (“I’m not being funny, but …”).

Here, she was Lorna, wife of Clifford, a biker and birdwatcher. While on two wheels Clifford had had an argument with a tree and come off worse. Now it was down to Lorna to muddle through life without him.

“Oh Clifford, you silly sod,” she sighed into the funereal gloom of her kitchen, scrambled egg on toast untouched before her. (I must say the EastEnders set has played a blinder in these remakes: the terrible wallpaper alone has been magnificent, and that single bed in Dot’s bedroom sobbed tragedy.) Lorna went to the spot on the A-road where the accident happened, and found herself drawn back again time after time, taking flowers, sitting on the verge in her high-vis vest. “Bearing witness, I suppose.”

This being a Talking Head we had only just begun to peel away the layers of Lorna and Clifford’s life together. Where this road would lead no-one, least of all Lorna, could be sure.

Dolan was perfect in the part, her character alternately felled and infuriated by grief. “I loved you Clifford, so why don’t I feel anything,” she said. The line was not delivered with a question mark, as if an answer was the last thing she wanted. Wonderful.

Not, perhaps, the best of the dozen, if only because it gave more away than the others. If we were playing Desert Island Talking Heads I’d go for Martin Freeman, A Chip in the Sugar, followed by Imelda Staunton’s A Lady of Letters. But still, Dolan can consider herself well and truly part of the Talking Heads family from now on.

Series available on iPlayer