Back in 2020, with the country in lockdown, the BBC commissioned updated versions of Alan Bennett’s consummate Talking Heads, originally broadcast in 1988. Ten of the 12 monologues were remade with a new A-list of British actors that included Kristin Scott Thomas, Lesley Manville and Martin Freeman reprising roles played first time around by Eileen Atkins, Maggie Smith and Bennett himself. Only two, A Cream Cracker Under the Settee and Waiting for the Telegram, both featuring the late, great Thora Hird, were not reprised. The omission was necessitated by the BBC’s rules around social distancing: during the pandemic, directors were barred from working with actors in any high-risk group, including those above the age of 70.
Bennett wrote two new monologues to replace the missing pieces, one for Sarah Lancashire and one for Monica Dolan, and very fine they were too, but Killing Time is proof that the characters he wrote for Thora Hird remained very much in his mind. In A Cream Cracker Under the Settee the fiercely independent Doris is determined never to end up in the rest home Stafford House, a fate repeatedly threatened by Zulema, the slapdash home help assigned to her by social services. “You go daft there,” Doris says vehemently. “There’s nowhere else to go but daft.”
