TV Pick of the Week: Brian and Maggie - review by Yvette Huddleston
Brian and Maggie Channel Four, review by Yvette Huddleston
When it comes to creating absorbing drama based on real-life events, award-winning screenwriter and playwright James Graham is among the best. His back catalogue includes the stage plays This House on 1970s British politics, Labour of Love about the ideological tensions within the Labour Party and Dear England about Gareth Southgate’s tenure as manager of the England men’s football team, as well as TV dramas such as Sherwood, dealing with the legacy of the miners’ strike in a Nottinghamshire mining town, Coalition, about the formation of the Conservative-LibDem coalition government, and Brexit: The Uncivil War exploring the strategies of the opposing sides in the run-up to the 2016 EU referendum.
In this two-part drama, Graham tackles the TV encounter between journalist Brian Walden (Steve Coogan) and Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (Harriet Walter) that took place in 1989 towards the end of her ten-year premiership, after the chancellor Nigel Lawson’s shock resignation. Walden was known as a skilled political interviewer and had interviewed Thatcher before several times. She regarded him as her favourite interlocutor and he was good at getting the best out of her. However, from Thatcher’s point of view the interview did not go as she – or her press secretary Bernard Ingham – had hoped or planned.
Graham’s script skilfully interweaves different timeframes, scrolling back from 1989 to earlier in the decade when Walden and Thatcher first met and formed an unlikely friendship. Politically they may have had their differences – Walden had been a Labour MP before stepping down to pursue his television career – but actually Walden and Thatcher had much in common. Both from working class backgrounds, they were grammar school pupils who did well in the state education system and then made it to Oxford University where they struggled to fit in and felt like outsiders.
What is interesting is how sympathetic the often-vilified Thatcher now comes across, in comparison to numerous politicians we have seen since, especially in recent times, mostly from her party, who lack the vision and integrity which she at least appears to have had. That is quite an indictment of the state of British politics today. Themes explored in the narrative include friendship and the pitfalls of combining the personal and professional, the importance (and demise) of the long-form political interview in a democratic society, betrayal and the vulnerability that comes with power. Coogan and Walter are both excellent and it all makes for absorbing viewing.