All by themselves: the best monologues in TV history

Talking Heads

Few TV shows are deemed so culturally crucial that they are included on the A-level English literature syllabus, but then Alan Bennett’s series of single-hander plays were unlike anything else surrounding it, certainly in 1988 when Talking Heads debuted. Twelve episodes were made of Bennett’s matchless original, in 1988 and 1998, with an array of Bennett-friendly performers from Patricia Routledge to Julie Walters to Thora Hird, who notched up two episodes apiece over its two seasons.

One Foot in the Grave: The Trial

One Foot in the Grave often broke with formula, but this solo turn from Richard Wilson remains one of the sitcom’s standout episodes. Home alone while waiting for his jury service call, Victor Meldrew spends the episode going out of his mind with boredom, self-diagnosing with a medical encyclopedia, trying to crack an impossibly difficult crossword, booking an appointment with his doctor and blowing his top after a delivery man leaves a yucca plant in his toilet. The episode was so beloved by Wilson that he planned to perform it at the Edinburgh fringe in 2016, until a heart attack forced the show’s cancellation.

EastEnders: ‘Pretty Baby …’

It was a bold experiment for EastEnders to eschew its usual multi-character format to zero in on just one person. Thankfully, it wasn’t Ian Beale in the spotlight, but Dot Cotton, who, in this single-hander by Tony Jordan, records a message for her husband, Jim, as he recovers from a stroke. Breathtakingly bleak (“All that I ever ’ad, I lost,” she says at one point), it’s a tour de force for the then-80-year-old June Brown, who on the strength of this episode, earned herself a best actress nod at the 2009 Baftas.

Hancock: The Bedsitter

When Tony Hancock told his writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson he wanted to go it alone sans long-time co-star Sid James, they gave him absolutely what he wanted – a full 25 minutes of unsullied solo Hancock. Now living in a shabby bedsit in Earl’s Court, this opening episode of the comedian’s final BBC series is Hancock at his pretentious, deluded best, wrestling with an impenetrable Bertrand Russell doorstopper while readying himself for a date that never happens. Paul Merton’s ill-considered 1996 remake should be avoided at all costs.

Marion and Geoff

Cheap-as-chips video-diary shows were all over TV in the late 90s, so when Marion and Geoff appeared on BBC Two in 2000 it was riding quite the cultural wave. Written by Rob Brydon and Hugo Blick, it starred the then little-known Brydon as Keith Barret, a sweet-natured but fatally naive taxi driver going through a messy divorce from his wife, Marion (Geoff is “the other man”). Despite its visual simplicity, the series managed over three season to paint a heartbreakingly detailed picture of an unsalvageable marriage.

Up in Town

Blick followed Marion and Geoff with this scandalously overlooked series of 10-minute monologues for BBC Two in which Joanna Lumley headlined as ageing divorcee Madison Blakelock. Living in genteel poverty in a one-room flat, each episode has the 18-years-single Blakelock wistfully recalling her jet-setting, high-living past. Gradually, through the six episodes, her carefully cultivated veneer of happiness begins to crumble, exposing the desperate bleakness at the heart of the series.

Queers

Screened in 2017 to mark 50 years since the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, these eight 20-minute pieces told a variety of stories based around the gay experience, from Mark Gatiss’s impossibly touching first-world-war-set The Man on the Platform – with Ben Whishaw as a returning soldier who had a brief and unconsummated dalliance with his superior – to Brian Fillis’s More Anger starring Russell Tovey as an 80s thesp railing against the media’s stereotyping of gay men.

The Twilight Zone: The Last Night of a Jockey

Mickey Rooney was once the go-to guy for breezy, sunshine-hearted goofballs, which is why it’s such a shock to see him as a splenetic, embittered ex-jockey in this typically twisty Twilight Zone from 1963. Furious not just at losing his job, but at his 5ft frame (“a short man with a short memory who’s forgotten that he’s worked for the sport of kings,” the narrator, Rod Serling, tells us), he’s visited in his drunken stupor by his more sober alter ego (also played by Rooney), who soon grants him his greatest wish ...

Doctor Who: Heaven Sent

There are few TV characters more prone to grandstanding as the Doctor, but never before in Doctor Who’s (then) 52 years had the show given its topline actor such a daunting, impossible-to-resist challenge, to carry an entire 55-minute episode by himself. Imprisoned in a gigantic, shifting clockwork castle, Heaven Sent finds Peter Capaldi’s Doctor trapped in his own personal hell, pursued by a terrifying and silent veiled figure. Loved and loathed in equal measure for its tricksy, bordering on avant-garde storytelling, it’s a virtual showreel for one of Doctor Who’s most underappreciated Doctors.

Underground: Minty

A critically adored, but chronically underwatched slavery drama that ran from 2016 to 2017, Underground hit its creative peak with the season two episode Minty. The real-life American abolitionist hero Harriet Tubman (played here by the mesmerising Aisha Hinds) delivers a titanic speech to a group of white activists. “Ain’t nobody gets to sit this one out, you hear me?” she tells them. Sadly, as sky-scrapingly brilliant as that episode was, it wasn’t enough to save the series, and Underground was canned shortly after.

Talking Heads starts 9pm, BBC One, 23 Jun