I was around when the televised interview between former Labour politician turned television presenter Brian Walden and the then serving Prime Minister, the formidable Margaret Thatcher took place, although I don't remember it being quite as consequential as this two part dramatisation would perhaps indicate. Nevertheless portraying real life interviews can make for good television and sometiimes cinema, as witness the Frost-Nixon exchanges, the two recent programmes on the Prince Andrew / Emily Maitlis tete-a-tete on the BBC "Newsnight" show and I can even recall the infamous exchange between rival football managers Don Revie and Brian Clough being made into a very watchable drama starring Michael Sheen and Colm Meaney a few years back. There's just something about a head-to-head confrontation between two usually media-savvy individuals striving to put across their point of view, although the ones we tend to remember are the ones that go wrong for the interviewee, another recent example being the catastrophic Michelle Mone interview with Laura Kuenssberg. People might also mention the most famous one of all, Princess Diana's confessional outpouring to Martin Bashir, which captivated the nation, but Bashir hardly took the offensive on that occasion and clearly was cleverly played by a Princess determined to have her point of view put across.
Still, this well-made programme certainly brought back the dog-days of Thatcher's near 11-year reign as Prime Minister, and indeed, within months of the broadcast, she had indeed been forced to resign by her own Party, at last sick and tired up of her autocratic ways, ruling her cabinet by dictat rather than consensus.
The show uses the by-now familiar format of retrospectively inserting into the present-day narrative, which actually doesn't amount to much more than watching Walden and Thatcher prepare for the interview, the preceding events, taking us back to Walden's own days in the Commons and Thatcher's surprise rise to power. I'm not sure I recall Walden ever being talked of as a future Labour leader as the show states but he assuredly was up there with the Robin Day's and the Dimbleby brothers as the grand inquisitors of the day.
A picture is built up of a growing mutual respect and possibly even a friendship between the two protagonists with the indication that this led to Walden going soft on Thatcher with each succeeding interview. In the end, Thatcher perhaps takes her relationship with Walden for granted, not receiving his calls and Walden at last reacting adversely to this as well as the promptings of his editorial team that he go on the offensive for once.
That he certainly does in the actual interview, with Thatcher, who coincidentally was at a particular crisis point in her administration with the recent shock resignation of her "unassailable" long-serving Chancellor Nigel Lawson, visibly bristling with each incisive thrust of Walden's. It's no surprise then to learn in a subtitle displayed over the end credits that the pair never talked again after the show.
The two episodes here seemed a bit fleshed out but nevertheless were well staged and very well acted by Steve Coogan and Harriet Walter in the lead parts. I just hope, well-made as they often are, that these heightened dramatisations of documented real-life events never get confused with the real thing! In these days of AI and fake news, you just never know!
