Stories beyond the script: Clashing with class, James Graham’s Brian and Maggie

If there is one drive that is common throughout the work of dramatist James Graham, it is the search for a modern British identity. From assessing Gareth Southgate’s reforming tenure in his play Dear England, to tacking his own divided Nottinghamshire village in his BBC show Sherwood, Graham’s dramas are unique in their ability to cast light on social relations and history which are so routinely kept, politely, out of public view. His new Channel Four two-part series, Brian and Maggie, may be his most revelatory search yet. Based off the real life relationship and interviews between Former Labour MP turned TV interrogator Brian Walden (Steve Coogan) and the imperious Tory leader turned Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (Harriet Walter), the series is bookended by their final interview in 1989. For it was in that interview that Walden seemed to turn on his longtime acquaintance. At her most politically vulnerable hour, following the resignation of her Deputy Prime Minister Geoffrey Howe, her party split over Europe and widespread public hatred over a ‘Poll’ tax she stridently pushed for, Walden chose to stick the knife in. Graham dramatises the events leading up to this “betrayal” as his character of Thatcher sees it. And therein lies the moral and social drive of Brian and Maggie. While on the face of it, it may look another ‘inspired by real events’ mini series, Graham uses this history to explore a social topic which is as uncomfortable as it is eye opening: class culture, specifically the heavy and pernicious insecurity that it instills into everyone, even those who rise up to the highest seats of wealth and power in society.

At the height of her power, Thatcher is tragically divided by the class lines made for her, and by those she will make for coming generations

Speaking to the Edinburgh TV Festival, Graham described class as Britain’s “least favourite diversity and inclusion topic”. Where others have, in past media depictions, skirted around the working class culture that Thatcher grew up in, Graham angles this to centre frame and focuses tight. In doing so, he presents a story that is perhaps more personal and more truthful than any cradle to grave film or three volume biography. Take for example an interview scene from Episode One. After an montage of ‘To Let’ signs on council houses, long lines outside the Job Centre and British troops in the Falklands, Walden asks whether the PM’s values have a resonance in Britain’s past. He notes that she has what he would consider “Victorian values”. To this frank remark, she responds emphatically, suggesting yes, she does, and that these were “the values we had when our country became great.” Through this subtle dialogue, Graham says the quiet part out loud. Following this, Walden and Thatcher have drinks and connect with shared stories of upward mobility. They talk of hard work, meritocracy and having limited choices and chances. Walden delivers a poignant monologue about his West Bromwich childhood, where his father got turned away because of the closed shop and his mother dying when he was twelve, and yet leaving him with books for a plentiful self education. In response, Thatcher speaks of her awareness that “one mistake and they will have me out. One day.” These moments, where Walden and Thatcher speak of the class culture they came out of, makes for a different, even more relatable history than depictions such as in The Crown or The Iron Lady, where Thatcher’s class was paid lip service but never explored meaningfully. It provides something tangible and relatable for an audience to latch onto from the beginning. Notice the conversation between Thatcher and her slippery economic adviser Alan Walters (Nick Sampson) during a election night victory party. She roars about not living in the socialist past and striving towards fourth and fifth terms. And yet, when she puts her arm around Walters, she shares comfort in his rise from poverty and state school to an Oxford professor, mirroring her and Walden’s own scholarship path to Oxford. She then points out the schools of the Tory ministers and MPs surrounding them “Westminster, Winchester, Eaton, Haberdasher’s Aske”. At the height of her power, Thatcher is tragically divided by the class lines made for her, and by those she will make for coming generations.

Representative television, hearing stories that dare to brave social currents as contentious as class and social history as sensitive as the Thatcher years, is something that Graham seems to get better and better at

The series moves at a brisk pace. When you finish it, you are not given a clean cut answer, but you are left asking yourself the right questions. Still, Graham is able to weave this complex commentary into engaging, classically done TV drama. Done in a variety of ways, a uniquely effective device is the use of Walden’s own writings about Thatcher. In a montage where we see Thatcher undergoing electronic bath treatment, Walden speaks about the slanders used against her and how it drives her back into herself. He worries that such repression creates an imbalance that leads to a deep loneliness within. Graham does not depoliticise Thatcher, but rather highlights the insecurities that she plainly had. It is only surprising to see this portrayed now is because, ironically, the conservative philosophy that she preached encourages such deep repression of class self-doubt. Having other characters to play off their Walden and Thatcher’s class dynamic allows for this commentary to ease in naturally, not have it seem forced. Downing Street Press Secretary Bernard Ingham (Paul Clayton) and Alan Walters play off Thatcher’s strident attitude, as both men grew out of the same class culture that she did. Vinay Ahmed (Karan Gill), a researcher on Walden’s interview team, provides a clarity to what this ongoing conversation around class amounts to. In a particularly potent moment in Episode Two, Walden and Ahmed have a debate over the outcomes of “The Thatcher Experiment”. Walden pokes and prods the similarly upwardly mobile Ahmed, crediting the higher wages, greater consumer choice and nicer cars that the past seven years had brought to the two men and the other new money winners of their class. Bluntly, Ahmed responds “We used to have communities. And now, we just have stuff.” This seems to be the turning point in Walden’s narrative, and it works perfectly. For it is Graham’s ability to look at the whole expanse of that era, both the winners and losers of it, that makes all the conversations in the show matter, those we see and hear, and those between the spoken lines.

Painful and uneasy as it’s internal commentary can be, Brian and Maggie sparks a needed conversation

Representative television, hearing stories that dare to brave social currents as contentious as class and social history as sensitive as the Thatcher years, is something that Graham seems to get better and better at in his writing. At the heart of Brian and Maggie, Graham asks a critical question. When a stubborn Thatcher scuttles away in the middle of their final interview, someone asks Walden why couldn’t she give an inch and let her ground down for a second. “Because we were taught not to. People like us. They wouldn’t let us in if we were weak.” That strong insecurity, passed down by fathers to sons and mothers to daughters for generations, leaves even the Iron Lady as merely another prisoner of a “Victorian” past. Those engrained values, left by people they never knew, that Walden and Thatcher cherished so much, strike to an inevitable conclusion. The final interview scene is suitably devastating, just as it was on that afternoon in October 1989. Walter and Coogan collide with darting looks without having to move from their seats. Thatcher’s expression would be expected as one of rage; it starts out as confusion, then deeply harmed. The scene becomes a microcosm, a synthesis of what show is trying to say. Walden made the hard but moral choice of interrogating Thatcher on herself, not her policies. Making the personal political, looking closely at the character of politicians not the ideology or ideas they believe in, certainly has it’s own set of problems but Graham’s masterful protagonists show that in-depth conversation can reveal truth and expand conscience. It may have been painful double cross for Thatcher, but as the closing montage details there is one fact that nobody challenges about the eleven years of her premiership. “The gap between the richest 10% and the poorest 10% has widened substantially.” Painful and uneasy as it’s internal commentary can be, Brian and Maggie sparks a needed conversation. The long form interview may be gone with the dust, but drama can weather stormy pasts, making us see our present a little bit clearer.