Six Plays: The Complete Series by Alan Bennett (1978/1979)
early seven hours of complete joy, with Thora Hird as the disapproving northern mother of an evening-class lecturer (‘Those ski-pants have never seen Zermatt’), Prunella Scales and Pat Routledge as a pair of secretaries pushing paper around, the tyranny of files and dockets and bureaucratic procedure (‘If you say “Try Personnel” I’ll staple your tits together’), Ken Jones as proprietor of a shabby guest-house (‘Breakfast is now being served, with a straight performance by Dave Allen, as an estate agent cracking up, rough sleeping in an empty tower block.
