Television critic's choice - The Last Word Monologues (BBC1)
By Gerard O'Donovan
The Last Word Monologues (BBC1)
You wait forever for a monologue on telly and now here come three in a row. They’re written and directed by Hugo Blick who, with Marion & Geoff and Up in Town, established a reputation as a creator of thoughtful, sometimes quietly amusing one-handers.
Not that there’s much competition. It’s a tricky format for TV (intense, undynamic, prey to flights of writerly/actorly self-indulgence), the best undoubtedly being Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads. Then there was June Brown’s amazing solo flight on EastEnders earlier this year when Dot Cotton recorded an emotional message to ailing husband Jim – but even that was a stretch. There’s a similar mood to tonight’s Before I Call You In, in which Sheila Hancock plays a woman preparing to say goodbye to her husband.
Here, though, she’s the one who is about to die, getting ready to end it all in a Swiss assisted-suicide clinic. As she waits to bid him adieu she mulls over the joys and disappointments of their years. It is tender, humane and very moving. But it is still a struggle to sit through, the writing and direction not engaging enough and the atmosphere just too bleak. Better is tomorrow’s Six Days One June in which Rhys Ifans is outstanding as a lonely-heart Welsh sheep farmer.
