Alan Bennetts Talking Heads - Season 1

Their stories are full of surprises and can be quietly devastating, and the episodes are like jewel boxes that gradually open up to reveal the riches within.

Filmed during lockdown with a fresh cast, they're as masterful, diamond-cut, powerful and painful as they ever were. Plus, Bennett has written two new ones, so that's joy unconfined for fun-loving people like us.

Lancashire, who seemed born to do Talking Heads, superbly trod this murky ground, presenting as a woman who knew how wrong and deeply pathetic it was to lust after her son but who still hoped that he might reciprocate.

It speaks to something that a series once heralded as the very best that telly could offer is now desirable mainly because it's dirt cheap and you can basically do it alone on a smartphone.

There's no one who evokes domestic menace, ordinary savagery, like Staunton.

Perfect for revival as we negotiate the long, strange summer of Covid-19. But, be warned, in the first two episodes at least, the misery truly is of the high caffeine, black tea and burnt toast variety.

Imelda Staunton glitters with equal fury, but her anger runs hot rather than ice cold.

It ought to have meant tears before bedtime, but Bennett gave us laugh out loud writing besides. That, plus superb performances, make Talking Heads a must see once more.

The one I particularly hated was one of the two new ones he has written, 'An Ordinary Woman'.

They are all deeply about loneliness and isolation in a way that's often hard to make gripping, but has never felt more urgent.

Perhaps the thing that really makes this revival work is that from a thematic perspective it couldn't have come at a better time.

The eyes have it in Alan Bennett's Talking Heads, which is in no way to discount this venerable writer's gift for words.