The Complete Talking Heads

The complete audio collection of Alan Bennett’s celebrated monologs, published together for the first time and performed by some of Britain’s best actors. The Talking Heads monologs are widely regarded as one of Alan Bennett’s finest dramatic achievements. First broadcast on BBC TV and BBC Radio 4 in the 1980s and 1990s, they won a host of awards and huge popular acclaim, and remain among his most admired works today.This collection includes all 12 Talking Heads, plus the precursor of that series, A Woman of No Importance. Beautifully crafted and full of compassion and wry observation, each tale is ripe with the quirky, insightful detail that has become Bennett's trademark. The monologs are: A Woman of No Importance (Patricia Routledge); A Chip in the Sugar (Alan Bennett); A Lady of Letters (Patricia Routledge); Bed Among the Lentils (Anna Massey); Soldiering On (Stephanie Cole); Her Big Chance (Julie Walters); A Cream Cracker Under the Settee (Thora Hird); Miss Fozzard Finds Her Feet (Patricia Routledge); The Hand of God (Eileen Atkins); Playing Sandwiches (David Haig); The Outside Dog (Julie Walters); Nights in the Gardens of Spain (Penelope Wilton); and Waiting for the Telegram (Thora Hird). Intensely moving, deeply engrossing, and highly entertaining, these spellbinding soliloquies are essential listening.

Alan Bennett was educated at Leeds Modern School and Exeter College, Oxford, where he read history. While doing postgraduate research he began to perform in cabaret, appearing first on the stage with the Oxford Theatre Group revue Better Late at Edinburgh in 1959. The following year he collaborated with Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, and Dudley Moore to put together the revue Beyond the Fringe which opened in Edinburgh and subsequently in the West End and on Broadway. Bennett’s first stage play, Forty Years On, played for more than a year in the West End. Subsequent plays included Getting On, Habeas Corpus, and The Old Country, as well as the television play An Englishman Abroad. Alan Bennett’s other best known works include his adaptation of The Wind in the Willows for the National Theatre, The Madness of George III (and also for the National and subsequently an Oscar-winning film), and two series of the monologs Talking Heads. His collection of diary entries, essays and reviews, Writing Home, was Book of the Year in 1994. Alan Bennett has made many recordings for the BBC, including The Lady in the Van, which he adapted for the stage and the cinema. His play The History Boys received six Tony Awards, and was adapted for the cinema that same year. Among Alan Bennett’s more recent work are the stage plays The Habit of Art, People, and Cocktail Sticks, and the novella Smut.