Steve Coogan shines in Brian and Maggie, a love letter to the political interview

In December 2019, at the end of an interview with Nigel Farage – then the leader of the Brexit Party – the BBC’s Andrew Neil turned to the camera and addressed the prime minister, Boris Johnson. “No broadcaster can compel a politician to be interviewed,” said Neil, “but leaders’ interviews have been a key part of BBC election coverage for decades.” Having watched Farage, Nicola Sturgeon, Jo Swinson and his Labour rival Jeremy Corbyn face the Neil hairdryer treatment, Johnson had opted out. A few days later, he won an 80-seat majority. Now, Channel 4 charts the story of the decline and fall of the political interview in a new drama, Brian and Maggie, which captures the art form at its seminal moment.

It’s 1989 and Brian Walden (Steve Coogan) is Britain’s pre-eminent political interviewer. His next interview is with the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher (Harriet Walter), who he has known for decades since they sat opposite one another in the Commons: Walden as a young Labour MP, Thatcher, his Tory counterpart. In the intervening years, they have met many times, with Walden serving as both interrogator and confidante. “He’s your favourite for a reason,” Bernard Ingham (Paul Clayton) soothes the PM on their way to the ITV studio. “It’ll be a walk in the park.” And yet it proves anything but, and their heavyweight, primetime clash marks, for many, the moment when Thatcher’s defenestration became inevitable.

The two-part drama, scripted by James Graham and returning to the political ground of Coalition and Brexit: The Uncivil War, is based on a book by TV producer Rob Burley called Why is this Lying Bastard Lying to Me? Burley calls the clash between Walden and Thatcher the “high watermark” of political interviewing, and contrasts it, favourably, with the desecration of the format in the Johnson era and beyond. And so, in its conception, Brian and Maggie is nostalgic for democratic norms. For a time when politicians answered the bloody question. For a time, even, when there was a strict delineation between politician and journalist. “An MP with a regular spot on television, wouldn’t that be…” Walden begins. “Unethical?” a producer finishes his sentence, “Yes.” Walden resigned his seat to become a journalist – unlike Farage, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Lee Anderson and all the other MPs who have hosted chat shows during their time in parliament, and find themselves in the crosshairs here.

The star of the show here is Walden. Coogan, always a superb mimic, nails the noticeable speech impediment (trouble pronouncing the letter r) and Black Country accent. He inhabits Walden’s stolid lack of glamour (a trait shared by great interviewers of this ilk, from Robin Day to Andrew Neil), allowing only his eyes to speak the truth of his ambition. Walter’s Thatcher, on the other hand, feels slightly off. She has one of the great faces of British acting, instantly making her characters, from Fanny in Sense and Sensibility to Caroline in Succession, piercingly intense. It is an odd fit for Thatcher, whose softer features were strikingly juxtaposed with her manner. And while performances from actors like Meryl Streep and Gillian Anderson have leaned, at times cartoonishly, into Thatcher's voice and mannerisms, Walter's is less instantly recognisable. That – along with the significant age gap between Walter and her subject – might be judged impressionistic, were the rest of the drama not recreated with such loving attention to period detail.

But Thatcher is a tricky role to play anyway. In the same way that Frost/Nixon, Ron Howard’s adaptation of Peter Morgan’s play, privileged Frost’s interiority over that of his iconic subject, so too does Brian and Maggie (directed by Stephen Frears) use, primarily, the journalist's perspective. Walden – who had considered defecting to the Tories over concerns about Labour’s far-left move, and went on to be a speechwriter for Thatcher during her time in No 10 – saw a kinship between himself and the prime minister. “People like us,” he tells her, “they wouldn’t let us in if we were weak.” Figures like Nigel Lawson (Ivan Kaye) and Geoffrey Howe (Paul Higgins) orbit like stray establishment bodies, bound to the gravitational pull of this Midlands odd couple.

Over the two 50-minute episodes, tension builds towards its unavoidable conclusion. Graham, who is, it’s no secret, left-leaning, stomachs some admiration for Thatcher’s willingness to have her feet held to the fire. It is, after all, what has been lost in the 45 years since this moment. “Now it’s all breakfast TV bollocks, cosy chitchats on the sofa,” Walden laments. And so even though the work is more politically equivocal than might be expected from the triumvirate of Frears, Graham and Coogan, it is still effectively polemical. Not in terms of refighting battles over the poll tax or the exchange rate mechanism, but in its sheer frustration with the way that scrutiny has been systematically eroded.