The BBC TV series on Margaret Thatcher is a wasted opportunity to shed new light on the lost world of the 1980s
The star of the new 5-part BBC 2 series about Margaret Thatcher (Thatcher: A Very British Revolution, Monday evenings) is Aileen McAllister. She wasn’t the Producer, Director or Historical Consultant. She was the Archive Producer of episode 1, and was responsible for its best moments.
Most of the interviews were familiar and uninteresting. The usual suspects: Ken Clarke, Kenneth Baker, Norman Tebbit, Norman Lamont, Chris Patten… The best by far were Michael Heseltine, still grinding those axes all these years on, but with some really perceptive lines about Thatcher’s lower middle class background, and Jonathan Aitken, who went out with Carol Thatcher for three years and was one of the handsome young men (Cecil Parkinson was another) whom Thatcher seemed to like to have around her. Heseltine and Kinnock were the only critical voices.
Much of the commentary in the opening episode lacked insight. How did Thatcher win the Conservative Party leadership in 1975? Was it really down to Tebbit and Airey Neave? How did she win the 1979 General Election (the largest swing since the 1945 Election)? Just a few predictable clips of piling rubbish during the Winter of Discontent and the Saatchi and Saatchi “Labour Isn’t Working” poster don’t really do the job. Is it a coincidence that several leaders elected in the mid-1970s (among them Jimmy Carter, Labour under Wilson succeeded by Callaghan, and Giscard d’Estaing in France) all lost power between 1979-81? Dominic Sandbrook, whose books on Britain in the 1960s and 1970s offer fresh and revisionist accounts, was one of the two historical consultants. I would have expected a much more original account with his input (if he had any).
One recurring problem with political documentaries is that they rely almost exclusively on politicians’ eyewitness accounts rather than historians, economists or social thinkers, who might offer real insights into the state of 1970s British society and the economy. Hardly a statistic in sight. Who voted for Thatcher in 1979? How was it that after the appalling Winter of Discontent and all the bad press Callaghan received, Thatcher barely won more votes than Heath in 1970 (and just 9 more seats). You longed for some serious questions and a few answers.
What was fascinating, however, was the TV archive. Britain was a different country. There were clips of a number of TV studio audiences. I counted one non-white face. Thatcher was the only woman in Heath’s Cabinet and only the second woman in any Conservative Cabinet. That’s quite a dry statistic. But when you see the footage of Thatcher, isolated, surrounded by a dozen of more middle-aged white men in grey suits, that speaks volumes about the social revolution in this country over the past 30 years.
Most of the programme trotted out the familiar clichés about Thatcher’s background: Grantham, her father and the local grocer’s shop. But there was one terrific clip of the married Thatchers’ country house, seven bedrooms and five acres in rural Kent, and a brief shot of the town house in Chelsea.
Episodes 2 and 3 marked a sad decline from the opening. All the usual suspects are there, of course: austerity, the Falklands, the Miners’ Strike, the IRA bomb at the Brighton Conference. But this was all very familiar and the reliance on politicians took its toll. Nothing on Murdoch and the media, the woeful Foot leadership, the split with the SDP. How did the economy revive? Did it? What are the figures? Thatcher won the Miners’ Strike — but at what cost to the nation? So many unasked questions. If only the BBC had given the money to Norma Percy and Brian Lapping. They would have made something memorable with it. Despite all the fascinating archive, Thatcher: A Very British Revolution told us more about the problems with political documentaries than it did about its subject.
