Alan bennett

Reviewing Sky’s The Heist before Christmas last year, I suggested that all feature-length festive television dramas begin with credits announcing a starry cast and end with a redeemed protagonist gazing up at some suddenly falling snow. Reviewing Sky’s Bad Tidings this year, I can rather smugly report that there’s no need to revise my theory. But just in case that isn’t enough television tradition to be going on with, here we also get that other Yuletide stand-by: the characters’ plans for the big day go hideously wrong, yet they still end up having the Best Christmas Ever. Viewed pleasantly drunk, I concede, Bad Tidings might just hit the spot The

’night, Mother is a two-hander that opens like a comedy sketch. ‘I’m going to kill myself, Mama,’ says Jessie. She’s cleaning a pistol and loading it with bullets. ‘I’ll shoot myself in a couple of hours.’ The pair live together in a lonely farmhouse, and Jessie wants to make sure her mother will be able to cope after her death. She tours the kitchen explaining where the fuses and the cleaning materials are kept. Mama, who doesn’t seem unduly alarmed, offers to phone her son and get him to thwart the suicide attempt. ‘I’ll just have to do it before he gets here,’ says Jessie. This is an intensely dramatic

The season of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads continues at the Bridge. In The Hand of God we meet Celia, a posh antiques dealer, who befriends old maids in the hope of acquiring their valuables cheaply. Like everyone in her trade she uses play-acting and mind games to give her the advantage while haggling. If her enemy falters, she pounces. A man visits her shop and becomes visibly excited by a framed drawing which Celia hoped to flog for £30. Spotting his eagerness, she trebles the price. He pays up and hurries out. Later she learns that the drawing was by an old master whose style she failed to recognise. Millions

Covid marshals have invaded theatreland. Arriving for a weekday matinee at the Bridge, I was greeted by stewards holding up illuminated boards. ‘PLEASE WEAR A FACE COVERING.’ Inside, the seating had been rearranged into clumps of twos and threes with the odd single perch sticking out like a toadstool. Nicholas Hytner offered us a pair of the best-loved scripts by his favourite living playwright, Alan Bennett. The afternoon was stuffy and I took sips from a bottle of water in accordance with signage which suggested that masks might be removed for the purposes of drinking. After each glug I diligently replaced my covering. Ten minutes into the show, I was

If you’ve been listening to The Archers lately, you’ll know how tedious monologues can be. The BBC has received so many complaints about the stream of soliloquys that has dominated the episodes since lockdown, that Mohit Bakaya, controller of Radio 4, has been compelled to issue an apology. The new format — introduced so that the cast and crew could follow social-distancing rules — has proven especially unpopular because, as some listeners have pointed out, the producers might easily have stitched recordings together to keep the drama going. Instead, they’ve more or less dispensed with dialogue between characters in favour of a watered-down talking heads approach. Given that it’s usually

The big mistake people make with Alan Bennett is to conflate him with his fellow Yorkshireman David Hockney. But whereas Hockney’s art is generous, warm, bright, life-affirming, Bennett’s is crabbed, catty, dingy, insinuating. The fact that the BBC-led establishment keeps telling us he’s a National Treasure tells us more about the BBC-led establishment than it does about Bennett. Bennett is typical of the English intelligentsia Orwell anatomised in his ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ essay: ‘It is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings.’ I’d forgotten quite

C4’s Friday Night Dinner was the nation’s stop off point for feeling a bit better about ourselves. It featured the Goodman family. Every week the Goodman’s two sons returned to their parents’ home for Shabbat dinner. Every week, things didn’t go to plan. Of course, the chaotic Goodmans stand in for all our chaotic families in these times. It is good to know that it isn’t only our own family that is a shambles. The guiding force, the everyday matriarch of that family, is Jackie Goodman – long-suffering mum, played by Tamsin Greig. ‘It is charming because it is all about coming home. I think that’s why people love it. The