Nostalgia Inc.

Struggling for home entertainment and suffering from a head cold, I recently found myself watching Brian and Maggie (Channel 4). This is the latest in Britain’s unofficial series of dramatisations starring Steve Coogan or Michael Sheen in which events that took place within the living memory of people aged over 45 are lovingly recreated with period detail (brown suits and smoking, mostly). Sheen has the edge over Coogan in terms of numbers, having played David Frost, Brian Clough, Tony Blair (three times), Kenneth Williams, Chris Tarrant and Prince Andrew while Coogan has settled for the less mainstream roles of Tony Wilson, Paul Raymond, DCI Clive Driscoll (from the Stephen Lawrence case) and Jimmy Saville. Both men are gifted mimics and in Brian and Maggie, Coogan and co-star Harriet Walter make up for looking nothing like Brian Walden and Margaret Thatcher by sounding exactly like them, albeit with Coogan’s imitation of Walden threatening to veer towards South African on occasion. 

The model for this two-part series is quite obviously Frost/Nixon, starring Michael Sheen as David Frost who paid silly money to interview Richard Nixon in 1977 but had the last laugh when he got the ex-president to make some self-incriminating remarks. It was a popular movie, but it was largely fictional. The plucky British journalist did not really get one over on Tricky Dicky. As the veteran Washington journalist Elizabeth Drew said at the time, the plot is “a contrivance; its telling is so riddled with departures from what actually happened as to be fundamentally dishonest; and its climactic moment is purely and simply a lie.”

Leaving aside the historical inaccuracies of the film, the interview itself was a big deal in 1977 and still holds the record for most-watched political interview ever. The events depicted in Brian and Maggie are, shall we say, not quite so epochal. On a Sunday lunchtime in 1989, people who were interested in politics turned on ITV and watched Brian Walden repeatedly asking Margaret Thatcher why she let Nigel Lawson resign while Margaret Thatcher repeatedly ducked the question. According to the Channel 4 “docu-series”, Walden was unusually belligerent in this interview, but it does not seem that way today and I’m not sure it seemed that way at the time. Thatcher walked away unscathed and remained Prime Minister for another year. Apparently, she never spoke to Walden again so it was a significant moment in their relationship, such as it was, but it was historically inconsequential.

What was it about this minor event in British television history that warrants a two hour retelling?

Thinking I had missed something, I watched the original interview which Channel 4 has considerately made available, but no. Walden kept asking the same question and Thatcher refused to give him a satisfactory answer. Isn’t that what tends to happen when politicians are interviewed?

What was it about this minor event in British television history that warrants a two hour retelling starring some of the nation’s finest actors? I have nothing against Walden, about whom I was mildly interested to learn more, and I mean no disrespect when I say that he was only the third most famous British political interviewer on television in the 1980s. His final interview with Thatcher was neither a masterclass nor a car crash. The makers of Brian and Maggie could have taken the opportunity to give us the answer to that question Walden kept asking, but this never seems to have occurred to them. Perhaps they thought that the workings of monetarism and the European exchange rate mechanism were too taxing for the modern viewer. Alan Walters is referenced several times in the interview and appears briefly in the drama, but unless you were already familiar with the story you would have no idea who he was or why he was important.

So why resurrect this little episode? Did someone just happen to have the intellectual property for it? Was Coogan looking for an excuse to do his Walden impression? Or is it simply that people who work in television love making programmes about television? In an age of streaming and catch-up TV, “water cooler” moments are so rare that anything that resembles one has to be immortalised with a big budget and an all-star cast. Prince Andrew’s ill-advised interview with Emily Maitlis has already been the subject of not one but two dramatic adaptations, one of which inevitably starred Michael Sheen. What next? George and Terry, a three-part Netflix series about the events leading up to George Best getting pissed on Wogan? Harty/Jones, a Hollywood blockbuster telling the inside story of how Russell Harty ended up getting slapped by Grace Jones in 1981?

There is a sense that the old creative industries are raking over the embers of twentieth century popular culture as a substitute for producing something original. Flicking through the channels the other day, I came across a 90 minute programme which gave a rundown of the “fifty greatest chocolate adverts of all time”. There is a new Superman movie coming out this year, 87 years after the character was created and 47 years after the first big-budget movie of the same name. When Kenneth Branagh decided to adapt Agatha Christie stories for the big screen a few years ago, he had 66 detective novels to choose from, but rather than pick a hidden gem he re-made the Poirot films that everyone has seen — Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile — and released them in the same order as in the 1970s. Many of the mainstays of what we used to call terrestrial television are now in their third or fourth decade. I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here started in 2002. Strictly Come Dancing started in 2004. The Apprentice and Dragon’s Den both started in 2005. Britain’s Got Talent will soon be onto its 18th series and is essentially a spin-off of Pop Idol and The X Factor which debuted in the early noughties. Have I Got News For You refuses to die despite descending into cringe many years ago and still has the same team captains as when it first appeared in 1990.

35 years ago! Watching Have I Got News For You today is like watching Harry Worth or Max Miller in 1990. Fine acts in their day, but we had moved on. Were there any series created in the 1950s that people were still watching in the 1990s? This is Your Life and The Sky at Night perhaps, but there was no demand for more Dixon of Dock Green. The year in which Brian and Maggie is set — 1989 — saw the release of Scandal, a film about the Profumo affair which was as far in the past as Walden’s interview with Thatcher is from our present day. But that was a genuinely seismic event which brought down a government and helped define a decade. Brian Walden getting slightly exasperated with Mrs Thatcher on London Weekend Television is not really in the same class, is it?

Steve Coogan is currently filming Saipan, a movie in which he plays the former Ireland football manager Mick McCarthy in a dramatisation of events leading up to the 2002 World Cup in which the angry midfielder Roy Keane told him to stick the tournament “up [his] bollocks” and walked out on the team. I will probably watch it. Coogan will nail the accent and it will make me nostalgic for the recent past, which is apparently all that matters now.