This inside story of May’s rise was sheer slapstick
As in politics, a week can be a very long time in television. If you ever wanted an example of how quickly a topical TV programme can become outdated thanks to a sudden shift in the political landscape, Theresa v Boris: How May Became PM (BBC Two) offered the perfect cautionary tale.
Commissioned before the General Election for the BBC’S Brexit – One Year On season, Justin Hardy’s docudrama was an odd yet ambitious concoction. A blend of dramatised scenes and eyewitness interviews with political insiders, it recalled the hectic three weeks that followed David Cameron’s post-referendum resignation last June, and how a mixture of political blunders and back-stabbing enabled Mrs May to snatch the leadership of the Conservative Party from Brexiteer-inchief Boris Johnson.
To be fair, the contributions from the likes of Will Walden and Nigel Adams from Team Boris, George Hollingbery from Team May and Tim Loughton from Team Andrea Leadsom were illuminating regarding the extraordinary political shenanigans and jostling for position that went on behind the scenes as the front runners rallied support in the leadership race.
The problems came with the near-slapstick style of the dramatised sequences. One of the opening scenes in which a member of Cameron’s cabal advised a colleague not to back May because “her campaign is going to be completely shambolic” certainly had an unintentional extra piquancy in the wake of the Election result. But overall the depictions of Johnson (Will Barton) and his advisers as endlessly bumbling, foul-mouthed incompetents, of Michael Gove (John Seaward) as a robotic Brutus surrounded by data-gathering apparatchiks, and of Leadsom (Cate Fowler) as a Machiavellian political climber, seemed written for broadbrush comic effect rather than documentary accuracy. So too with the droll off-key casting in every role but that of Mrs May (Jacqueline King).
Perhaps if the Prime Minister had delivered her ambition of winning a strong and stable landslide,
Theresa v Boris might have seemed as harmlessly retrospective as was intended when it was filmed.
As it is, the new reality that all the jostling, backstabbing, and in-fighting might be going on again in Westminster even as we watched, felt too near the knuckle to be amusing.
Two episodes into the new series of (BBC One) and Cap’n Ross (Aidan Turner) is heading for some tantalisingly epic new trouble. For once it’s neither a woman nor his sense of injustice that’s at the root of it, but those pesky French revolutionaries, who’ve captured his beloved medical pal, Dwight Enys (Luke Norris).
We last saw Ross boarding a boat for Brittany with the deeply dubious Tholly Tregirls (Sean Gilder), a salty old sea dog with a hook for a hand and a voice box that seemed encrusted in barnacles, so unintelligible was his accent. You just know it’s a rescue mission that will not end well.
This came at the close of an unusually sedate episode that spent much of its time pushing the idea that if there’s one thing that Ross Poldark hates more than chaos and strife, it’s the quiet life. Why else would he abandon his pregnant wife, his happyish home life, his now thriving farm and prospering mines to go running off on a madcap escapade?
Perhaps it’s a midlife crisis. He only got to gallop across a clifftop once this episode. He also made one of the biggest mistakes of his life by petulantly refusing to follow in the family tradition and become a magistrate – leaving the way open for his arch-rival George Warleggan (Jack Farthing). Even his position as the nation’s most swoonsome leading man was under attack from Demelza’s brother Drake (Harry Richardson), who has embarked on a fizzing romance with Morwenna (Ellise Chappell).
When Ross finally bared his formerly faint-inducing chest for the first time this series, lying abed with Demelza, one arm was stretched back behind his head in an all too obvious effort to achieve some pectoral definition. When the following scene featured a younger, tauter, half-naked Drake shaking himself off like a duck in a mill race while performing his morning ablutions, writer Debbie Horsfield’s meaning couldn’t have been clearer. Cap’n Ross’s brooding hero years are done. The mantle has been passed.
Theresa v Boris: How May Became PM ★★ Poldark ★★★