While Brian Walden is thoroughly obscure in Ireland, in the UK, the former British Labour Party MP is regarded as one of the finest practitioners of the lost art of the long-form political interview. He is particularly famous/notorious for a bruising 1989 London Weekend Television grilling of the then British prime minister Margaret Thatcher when he pressed her about her intolerance for opposing views.
She didn’t respond well to his dogged line of questioning and lost her temper. As told in Brian and Maggie – a solidly entertaining two-part dramatisation of the encounter (Channel 4, Wednesday and Thursday, 9pm) – this fired the starter pistol on her ousting from office. Thatcher certainly regarded the conversation as significant – though long-friendly with Walden, they never spoke again after the interview.
There has been no shortage of on-screen Margaret Thatchers in recent years. Meryl Streep played her as a humourless weirdo in The Iron Lady, while Gillian Anderson leant into the cliche of Thatcher as an ice queen with robot-like tendencies in The Crown. In Brian and Maggie Harriet Walter offers another spin on one of Britain’s most consequential leaders. As with Steve Coogan’s Walden, Thatcher was a lower middle-class striver who came from nothing and has never been allowed to forget it by the posh idiots with whom she must deal each day.
“We have to tolerate them,” she confides in Walden. “They bluff and they blag their way through and they have unlimited chances. If I don’t spend hour after hour preparing every detail ... you never do shake it off do you – the feeling one has of being an outsider?”
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It’s the perfect articulation of what it’s like to be in a profession historically dominated by the posh and the privileged – and how surprising that it should come from an (albeit semifictional) Margaret Thatcher. Walter does well in this scene and elsewhere in going beyond the stereotypes of Thatcher – the ones that proved such an impediment to Streep and Anderson – and shows us glimpses of the human under the helmet hair.
Coogan is less convincing as Walden in that you are never not aware that you are watching Alan Partridge trying on a Birmingham accent for size. The real Walden was a formidable figure – a distinguished Westminster orator who seamlessly transitioned to television and, alongside David Dimbleby and the more junior Jeremy Paxman, raised the skewering of politicians to an art form. But Coogan can’t get beyond a parochial cuddliness that he assumes on the part of Walden and doesn’t show us enough of his steeliness so that when he finally turns on Thatcher, it feels like a betrayal of his character as much as of the British prime minister.
Watching from Ireland, the other question is why nobody here has tried to interrogate the past via the medium of televised drama. Can you imagine a miniseries about Pádraig Flynn’s “Try it sometime” speech on the Late Late Show? Or what about the Brian Lenihan Snr “mature recollection” controversy that sunk his 1990s presidential hopes? There’s so much material, and we can only look at Brian and Maggie, and despair that no Irish broadcaster has the ambition to bring our history to light in so riveting a fashion.
