MAGGIE GETS THE BIOPIC TREATMENT AND . . . . YOU END UP QUITE LIKING

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Jun 8, 2008 | by DAMIEN LOVE

AROUND the turn of the year, as Cranford shifted slowly to Lark Rise To Candleford, it felt disturbingly as if the BBC had embarked upon a psychotic campaign to choke us all to death with period drama. Over the past few weeks, they've been at it again. This time, though, instead of dressy literary adaptations, the fever is for real, famous lives and the dramatisations that may be wrung out of them, and then rammed down our throats.

Of course, we've always had biopics on television, but never, surely, so many as now. There was barely time to digest the quartet of films in BBC Four's Curse of Comedy strand before Julie Walters appeared dressed as Mary Whitehouse, and now, with the scent of her hat still lingering in the air, Whitehouse's fellow horsewoman of the apocalypse comes rearing up in Margaret Thatcher: The Long Walk To Finchley (Thursday, BBC Four, 9pm).

The new vogue for biographical TV drama can trace its roots back to 2003 and the success of The Deal, Peter Morgan's brilliant dissection of BlairBrown, which demonstrated how these things might not only document, but get under the skin with serious, probing cultural intent and yet, crucially, still have the most wicked sense of fun.

The weird thing is, of the dramas in its wake, the most successful have been those about what might laughingly be called less serious figures. With the exception of Longford, Morgan's own masterly study of the campaigning peer, plays about comedians and other entertainers (The Curse Of Steptoe, Kenneth Williams in Fantabulosa, the Fanny Craddock of Fear Of Fanny) have said more about their subjects, about life and about Britain in the second half of the 20th century than the films about politicians. Blowing raspberries at nominal leaders is a long, jealously guarded British custom, but what does it mean when members of the Carry On team are accorded complex and achingly human treatments, while the movers and shapers of the system are reduced to broad, shallow, tabloid pantomime in the likes of A Very Social Secretary, The Trial Of Tony Blair and Confessions Of A Diary Secretary?

Focusing on the period between Thatcher's first attempts to break into politics in 1949 and winning her first seat a decade later, Long Walk To Finchley is a brilliantly odd one. Writer Tony Saint continues in the trend of sidestepping difficult personal and political questions and opting to romp instead.

What sets his drama apart from the programmes listed above, however, is that it is genuinely, delightfully entertaining, wonderfully textured in its evocation of time and place and, because of all that, actually does manage to make you think of Thatcher in human terms. Even sort of like her.

Except, it's not really Thatcher at all, as Saint makes clear with the subtitle to his embroidered speculation: "How Margaret Might Have Done It".

The "it" is how a driven young woman managed to kick against the pricks and attain her goal at a time when sexism was so prevalent that it didn't even have a name and, arguably, was at its strongest within her own party, whose doors were doubly locked due to her class status as "a bloody grocer's daughter". As one (female) character snipes: "A woman's place is in the home, not the House."

It's a subject worthy of consideration, but "loosely based on fact" doesn't get much looser. Still, that didn't stop the programme garnering headlines recently, when newspapers seized on a scene in which, as they reported, Saint suggests the young Margaret made sexual advances to Ted Heath. In fact, they all missed the gag: Margaret isn't making a physical advance at all, but actually, huskily, breathlessly giving Heath a political come-on.

This is Saint's main theme: it's politics, and nothing else, that gets her pulse racing. But the weird, goosy sexiness this bright, pop portrait of Thatcher possesses has less to do with his writing than with the astonishing actor playing Maggie, Andrea Riseborough. She's ably supported by Rory Kinnear, who brings delightful resignation as Denis, and Geoffrey Palmer and Michael Cochrane, providing exquisite harrumphing as gouty, boozy old High Tory buffers - but it's Riseborough who keeps this thing ticking and bubbling.

It's a performance for the ages. I shudder to imagine how long she must have spent studying footage of Thatcher, but it's all here: those odd, bending tics and grimaces; those flickers of smiles and sinister compassion that suggest an uncomprehending Terminator trying to learn to be human by copying expressions; that carefully softened voice, shredded into a terrifying iron bark when riled.

More precisely, Riseborough deftly suggests the evolution of these traits. Watching the disconcertingly peppy, wide-eyed brunette slowly transform into the Thatcher we came to know, gradually going blonde and assembling her twin set-and-pearls armour, I was reminded of the second Star Wars trilogy, in which we knew young Anakin Skywalker was destined to become Darth Vader: "If I was in charge, there would be free milk for all children, " the idealistic young Margaret sighs in free market frustration at one point. Maybe comedy is the right way to go, after all. If you weren't laughing, you'd have to cry.