Brian and Maggie illustrates the kind of honest political interview we’re being deprived of today
In 1989, heavyweight political inquisitor Brian Walden badly wounded an already beleaguered prime minister Margaret Thatcher in a now-legendary television interview.
For the benefit of anyone who’s missed Steve Coogan‘s headline-grabbing press tour (the actor suggested that Thatcher was so lacking in empathy that she would have been diagnosed with a disorder were she around today), Channel 4’s two-part drama Brian and Maggie recreates the moment that arguably sealed the fate of the outgoing PM.
By then, Walden – a Labour MP turned TV’s foremost political interviewer – had developed a friendship with Thatcher based on mutual admiration and a shared, relatively humble background. The PM hoped to repair some of the damage wrought by chancellor Nigel Lawson’s resignation weeks earlier, but Walden went for Thatcher’s jugular in a ruthless 45-minute inquisition. Thatcher saw his take-no-prisoners confrontation as a betrayal and the two never spoke again.
The interview itself is covered in the second of the two episodes written by James Graham (Sherwood, Brexit: The Uncivil War) and directed by Stephen Frears, whose most relevant work in this context is the 2003 New Labour drama The Deal. The opening episode begins in 1977 as Walden (Coogan), having resigned as a Labour MP and taken a job with London Weekend Television, conducts the first ever full-length interview with Thatcher (Harriet Walter), then leader of the opposition.
His producers at LWT’s politics progamme, Weekend World, think he has been too soft on someone they see as an ideologue. “She answers the bloody questions… that’s refreshing,” says Walden.
His reply goes to the heart of Graham’s drama – a paean to a time when politicians submitted to such lengthy forensic television interviews. Brian and Maggie begins with an archive montage illustrating the erosion of this journalistic art form, with increasingly combative questioning from Robin Day to Jeremy Paxman putting MPs on the defensive. Indeed, the drama is based on Bob Burley’s book Why Is This Lying B*****d Lying to Me?, a title derived from a famous Paxman quote about his antagonistic approach to the job.
Recreating interviews seems to be a new TV genre; there were two dramas last year extrapolated from Prince Andrew’s car-crash 2019 Newsnight sit-down with Emily Maitlis. Such killer interviews are inherently dramatic (as well as being relatively cheap to replicate) although a background knowledge of the participants is important to exert maximum power. We certainly get that here.
Walden and Thatcher were two peas in a pod, both lower-middle class Midlanders made good, by way of Oxford and a belief in hard graft. “I was never a socialist,” reveals the former Labour MP over a cosy fireside chat, as they toast their whiskey tumblers to meritocracy and their aversion to “bluffing and blagging” public school types. This scene lands despite threatening to be too on the nose, as does a subsequent one in which Thatcher phones Walden to tell an unfunny joke that she had failed to remember earlier.
Nigel Lawson (played with the requisite bulk by Ivan Kaye) understandably has the largest cameo of all her cabinet colleagues. In an amusing (and apparently true) scene after her 1983 election triumph, the PM simultaneously promotes Lawson to chancellor and tells him to get a haircut.
But it’s the two lead performances that are vital. Coogan had a much tougher job last year playing Jimmy Savile in The Reckoning; Walden is far less familiar, his most distinctive feature being his inability to pronounce his Rs. Walter, on the other hand, is following the likes of Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady and Gillian Anderson in The Crown. Hers could be the best Thatcher yet – particularly in her intonation and mannerisms.
Walter certainly delivers a more rounded Thatcher than we’re used to, although any 80s nostalgia is limited to the lost art of the unspun, in-depth political interview. Brian and Maggie illustrates the kind of political interview (not to mention honesty) of which we are we’re being deprived. After all, you couldn’t base a two-hour drama on a soundbite or a tweet.
‘Brian and Maggie’ continues tomorrow at 9pm on Channel 4