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Talking Heads

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Alan Bennett has been called England's National Teddy Bear, so beloved is his work and person. It's a sweet moniker, but misleading to those who may not have yet read Bennett. Insightful and compassionate with a wit so sharp it effectively amputates sentimentality, this is a Teddy Bear with laser eyes and sharp claws that are only just retracted.

Bennett's character sketches in Talking Heads are devastating. The grown man whose safe little existence begins to unravel as he discovers his dear old mum has taken a lover, the vigilent, upright busybody who ends up in prison for invading her neighbor's privacy, the widow of "Soldiering On" whose emptiness of purpose is revealed through her inability to grieve--each uncomprehending character Bennett has created in these astonishing soliloquies is undone by his or her brave and steadfast unwillingness to acknowledge the bare-knuckled truth of human emotion.

Bennett is not cruel in revealing the weaknesses of his characters, but he is uncompromising in revealing those weaknesses. This is the Teddy Bear who brings to the picnic the sharp knives that cut through the bread and fat prepared and packaged by his companions.

Also recommended are Bennett's Writing Home, The Clothes They Stood Up In, and any and all of his other plays, particularly The Old Country; and, for those who just must have the soft and fuzzy version of the Teddy Bear, listen to Bennett's reading of Winnie the Pooh, or go see his stageplay of The Wind in the Willows.

I suppose I am a bit biased because I grew up in the same town as Alan Bennett (Leeds, Yorkshire) but this book is truly remarkable. The characters are a mixture of people we all know. A chip in the sugar is the man who lives down the street, A lady of Letters is always in the post office (usually in front of me !). All these people exist, what Alan Bennett does is drag them out of their lives and our heads and put them there in front of us. We may read about them and dismiss them as characters in fiction but they all exist and in most cases there's bits of them inside each of us. Thanks Alan Bennett for entertaining us and teaching us at the same time.

I can't believe I'm the first person to review this masterpiece! Maybe it's because Bennett seems so very British, English even, that he's not appealled to American readers. I'm sure you're missing something worth having.

Bennett is a masterful observer of character and the six monologues gathered in this collection all display strong characters revealled with a sharp eye and a compassionate heart. Bennett is witty and controlled in his approach, allowing his characters to reveal themselves and their foibles subtley. I find these little tales deeply moving as well as funny, despite the apparently mundane subjects he's dealing with.

I can't think of a comparison to make to illuminate his style, especially since monologue is very rarely seen these days. I can see an affinity to A. Maupin and R.Rodi in terms of waspish observations of people and their social milieu. Bennett's characters aren't blatantly queer like Maupin's or Rodi's, they're not young and tre! ndy things either, but Bennet's own sensibilites and sensitivities give queer readers pause for thought, especially about the older, isolated members of society.

He takes us right inside the heads of six very ordinary people and lays bare their lives, their self-delusions and their petty snobberies in their own words. The texts were originally written as television plays and were broadcast on the radio by the BBC too, however, they work perfectly well on the page, rather like short stories. Why not try it and see for yourselves!

This review refers to The Complete Talking Heads in the Kindle edition.

Bennett's little character studies are wonderful. The best way to enjoy them is through the recordings of the original broadcasts, performed by topnotch actors. They are also now available complete in a single paperback. The Kindle edition is a slightly cheaper alternative but it is, sadly, a case of getting less than you pay for.

It's a mystery to me how, in this age of digital files, the text of a work can become mangled in its progress from one format to another. The Kindle edition contains hundreds of typos, most of them missing spaces between sentences. Clearly the text was run through software to change straight quotes to curly quotes, and the missing spaces have confused the algorithm so that many of the quotes are curling the wrong way. Also "Go to Beginning" takes you to a point in the middle of the book, and the navigation marks are incomplete.

One gets used to this sort of thing in free public-domain e-books, but it's very disappointing to see it in a commercial product, especially when it costs almost as much as the printed version.

I'm aware, by the way, that I'm sounding a bit like the Lady of Letters as I write this. ;-)

There are few things that are more enjoyable than a rainy afternoon and this collection of character sketches on the IP. It is very easy to draw a picture of a person in crisis in the context of a two hour play; it is another thing entirely to carry out the same within the space of 30 minutes. These radio programs feature, for the most part soliloquies by people facing any number of personal crises from ill relations (in both senses of the word), trouble with the law and realization that their spouses were not quite what they might have been on first inspection.

I have to confess to a few favorites. "Bed Among the Lentils" is the story of a bored vicar's wife who finds the satisfaction that her life with a man of God has not provided in dry sherry and an the Indian owner of the off license. God is a business much like anything else. Ultimately she is disappointed by both and has to go through life as a prop in her husband's rise in the clerical hierarchy as he shamelessly exploits his wife's problems to show he has the compassion he clearly lacks. God is a business, just like agricultural machinery.

"Soldiering On" is the story of an upper-class woman whose husband dies and by inches her world dissolves. Curiously she manages to keep up a brave front, finding solace in television and a walkman. This ultimately makes her story far more compelling than had Bennett allowed her to dissolve into histrionics

"Her Big Chance" is the story of an actress who, as the reader gradually learns, has taken work in a soft core pornographic film. The fact that she insists on maintaining a certain air of professionalism and dedication to her "craft" makes this all the more hilarious.

These stories are, like most of Bennett's work, inspired compositions. One can only look forward to future efforts from this quarter.

I was lucky enough to see the original broadcasts of these mini-plays in the UK in early 1989, and I found a copy of the telescripts at Foyle's and snapped if up. For the uninitiated, these pieces aren't just monologues, they're little separate worlds, each peopled by one character who tells his/her story. In "Her Big Chance", Leslie (a sparklingly ditzy, yet deeply innocent Julie Walters) tells us how exciting and "really interesting" it's been, working on a big film (as "Topless Girl #2, it turns out). "Are we on cans, Roger, I said, because if we are, I'd just like some direction..." Deluded but optomistic, she sits, all dolled up and thrilled, waiting for the call to stardom that will never come, while the crew is out on the bay filming "establishing shots".

In "A Cream Cracker Under the Setee", an elderly woman who's fallen and can't get up, muses on her now-dead husband, and conceives of the notion--as plain to us as her predicament--that she tidied herself out of a marriage.

My favorite, "Soldiering On", is told in the jaunty, bucked-up words of a comfortable Home Counties matron whose husband's just died, and whose son, Giles, has kindly taken over the finances: "No can do, mummy, we must tighten our belts!" A year later, in a boarding house, she admits, sheepishly, that "I suppose Giles has been a bit of a scamp--". Meanwhile Margaret, her lumpish, virtually catatonic daughter, has for some reason blossomed after her father's death. Then the other shoe drops...

"How do I feel? Sorry for her, of course. Sorry for HIM, too, come to that..."

And then, holding up a Walkman: "This is my new toy! I get tapes from the lending library in the High Street. And I'll listen to anything. No fear....Fan!"

And then: "I wouldn't want you to thing I'm a tragic woman. I'm not the type..."

Maybe I've quoted Bennett wrong--my copy's still packed away from the last move. There are several other "stories"--some funny, some apalling, but all laced through with gentle pathos, and a very BRITISH knowledge of some very universal foibles. And that's why Alan Bennett is still the best, as David Sedaris is here. Each man knows us all to be both the victims and instigators of our own fates.

Although this collection doesn't seem to be very well-known, I loved it, and enjoy teaching it with my Honors English class (high-school). The series was first written for television, I believe for a BBC series; in each episode, a single character, placed in a small variety of settings, speaks directly to the camera. Each story consists of one character discussing an episode or series of related episodes in his or her life; the interesting part (and the part that makes this so great for teaching) is that we hear only one character's perspective, and so need to evaluate his or her credibility and level of self-awareness; often, we also need to attend to small cues to figure out the whole story. Very enjoyable, as long as you are willing to do some digging and re-reading.

I have been studying Alan Bennett and like many others find it highly amusing. It works remarkably well as a television series and not just on the page. The personalisation and connection to the viewer draws you in and makes it appear that each character is actually talking to you. Excellent work

Honestly I thought the story was quite dull he tells us about the dull part of their lives, I'm surprised I didn't sleep reading it. It's the worst book I've ever read. You probably won't put this on display on the computer, but you asked what I thought of it and I told you the truth, I'm sure many others agree with me that the story was boring. . Thankyou