Telling Tales and Talking Heads, by Alan Bennett (BBC Worldwide, £6.99 and £9.99).

ALAN Bennett wrote Talking Heads specifically for television and it was a work that deservedly came in for a number of accolades.

Incredibly, it is more than 10 years since the first series, a collection of monologues performed by people who were themselves familiar faces on our screens.

Yet the remarkable aspect to Talking Heads was that it didn't matter whether it was Julie Walters or Patricia Routledge doing the honours.

For somehow or other, we forgot that it was a celebrity speaking to us it was the anonymous subject, this face in the crowd that came through. Such was the power of Bennett's narrative.

Of course, we all have our favourites. Mine's Thora Hird. Her role as an old woman in a nursing home looking back through 90 years from vibrant youth to decrepit old age was compelling viewing.

No doubt you too, will feel there is one that rises above the others.

So make your choice - for here they are, every single word of the original scripts.

This is the type of book that is probably better cherry-picked during those odd moments when you feel like entering someone else's talking head.

Telling Tales is Bennett at his most powerful, his trademark masterly command of narrative oiled by his incomparable uncluttered prose.

Like most of us, his early life was unremarkable. But this matters not for here is a man who, like all great writers, has the gift of making even the most mundane fascinating.

John Phillpott