Roadkill rat is so deadly dull
HAS a “charismatic” politician ever been as dull as Roadkill’s Peter Laurence?
We can’t blame Hugh Laurie, who positively crackled with loathsome charm in The Night Manager.
No, the fault lies entirely with David Hare’s script.
As my grandad used to say, “You’d find more life in a tramp’s vest”.
Love rat Laurence boasted: “Voters think of me as a character.” Why, though? He’s no Boris. (Mind you, these days neither is Boris.)
The posh, Croydon-born “man of the people” is like a composite of Jeffrey Archer, Nigel Farage and Jonathan Aitken without any of the attributes that make them interesting.
Peter has a talk-radio show (unlike any serving minister ever), but no populist policies to speak of. If anything, he’s on the wetter wing of the
Tory Party. And everyone around him hates his guts.
We meet him after he wins a £1.5million libel pay-out from a newspaper. Even his brief thinks that he’s “as guilty as hell”.
Laurence has a bit on the side and an illegitimate mixedrace daughter in a women’s prison (neither of which would play badly in Croydon).
His big sin in Hare’s eyes is his secret plan to “privatise the NHS” (a process Labour started in 2003).
But how would weaselly Laurence make that government policy? Why not give the “evil” Tory a credible political agenda? Are they worried viewers might warm to him? (ITV scrapped Vote For Me after Rodney Hylton-Potts stormed to victory on a “cabbies’ manifesto”).
Hare’s last drama flop, Collateral, preached student politics every week and saw millions turn off. Turks & Caicos was just as turgid. But the licence fee featherbeds failure and Hare’s harebrained agit-prop ticks all the right BBC boxes… so on it goes.
The chances of a Corporation drama inspired by Mandelson, Thornberry or Vaz are minuscule.