Steve Coogan really is the man of a thousand faces, and by far the most skilled actor around for playing real-life characters (with all due respect to Timothee Chalamet). Whether he’s playing Tony Wilson (24hr Party People), or Jimmy Saville (chilling, in The Reckoning), or, er, Steve Coogan (The Trip), he is the guy who doesn’t merely impersonate: he gets under the skin of these people.
And he’s at it again in Brian and Maggie, where he plays broadcaster Brian Walden, who presented a long-form political interview show on LWT in the 80s. The difference here is that he has a rival in the ‘being-very-good-at-playing-real-people’ stakes, as he goes toe-to-toe with Harriet Walter as Margaret Thatcher.
Walter won all the plaudits as the slippery mum in Succession, and here further stretches out her talents with a staggering Maggie. And it is very much a Maggie. The show – and this may be off-putting for some – puts a more human face on The Iron Lady than we are commonly used to. This is very much the titanic PM as seen through the eyes of a man who admired her. Indeed, kind of fancied her.
Maggie Thatcher as an object of affection? Really? Well, apparently. Walden, a former Labour MP becomes rather smitten with her, at first struck dumb by her domineering nature when she becomes his first guest on his new show prior as leader of the opposition, then gradually becoming overawed by her charisma as she goes on to rule the country for the next 11 years.
I mean, it’s not erotic fireworks, but the pair connect over both being political outsiders, having overcome poor backgrounds to hit the tops of their professions; this shared belief in working hard to rise above, allows him to forget his concerns over the inequality that could result from her vision of neo-liberal individuality. And indeed abandon his professionalism by helping her write a speech at the 11th hour late one night.
Coogan and Walter make for a captivating double act as the show skips back in forth in time, from their early halcyon days to the fateful final interview. For the famous aspect of this whole thing is that Walden triggered the downfall of Thatcher with a skewering interview which took place after the resignation of her Chanceller Nigel Lawson. Coogan masterfully shows how Walden’s softer stance towards her played on his mind, enough for him to want to make amends and properly grill her in that final interview. They never spoke again.
The show is wonderful to look at, a real 80s throwback, all lovely clunky fonts and clunky furniture and clunky phones. The supporting cast, with Paul Higgins as Geoffrey Howe and Ivan Kaye as Lawson, are all effective and you have a real sense of how Thatcher started coming apart at the seams under pressure from her own party and her own inflated sense of self. An edge of mania comes into Walter’s performance as the older Maggie, a certain desperate grip beneath the mannered surface. We see her using electric baths as health remedies, and Walden eventually needles her in that last interview by confronting her with the whispers that she is, “off your trolley.”
But while this is all nicely handled, the two-episode show lacks tension. You never have a sense of high stakes, either in terms of Thatcher’s fearsomeness or the effects of her policies on the country. We hear a little about the division caused, with Walden agreeing with his younger colleague that the poll tax was a mistake, a sign of her losing her instincts, “That’s not the Thatcherism I understood.” His colleague retorts, “It is the one I understood.”
Sure we are seeing her mostly through Walden’s eyes, but it goes a little easy on her. Walden concedes that she may be blind to the issues she has caused for people but the show doesn’t deal with it either. As such, the show lacks a little bite.
It is a good watch, the softening of the two characters up against each other is very well played, and we see a lauding of moments when personal interaction over a whisky – pre-Zoom! – was a means to find common ground. But was this seduction on Thatcher’s part towards Walden? Not for sex but for good press? It is not portrayed so cynically. This is instead about a good woman with a big vision who loses her thread. Seems she triumphed after all.
Streaming now on Channel 4. Episode two airs at 9pm on Thursday
