David Sexton Hard grafters, state educated, gay with kids: welcome to the very modern FO
Inside The Foreign Office 1/3 BBC2, 9pm
MICHAEL Waldman is a prolific documentary maker who has specialised in getting inside our great institutions, such as the Royal Opera House, the Cambridge college Queens, Stephen Fry, Rupert Everett and Her Majesty the Queen, in the hope of exposing their intimate workings.
Usually the great institutions come out well enough, although The House (1996) caused a rumpus. The Royal Opera had complacently collaborated in filming without seeming aware of how it would appear to the outside world: astonishingly incompetent, wasteful, bitchy and, well, queeny. Ever since, it’s been a reference point for documentary calamities. Few other great institutions have let themselves be so exposed since.
The Foreign Office has not made any such mistake. If the message of the last documentary on its work, Michael Cockerell’s The Great Offices of State, in 2010, was that politicians ignored the advice of diplomats at their peril, this one seeks to show that not only is it hard at work on our behalf but it has modernised itself. No longer is it dominated by plummy-voiced public schoolboys.
Filming began a few days after last June’s general election and continued until this summer, thus running from Boris Johnson’s return as Foreign Secretary to his resignation and replacement by Jeremy Hunt. In the two episodes to come, Brexit looms large. This, though, is more of a scene-setter.
We meet Sir Simon McDonald, the suave and personable Permanent Under-Secretary (or PUS — they need to something about that) at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the head of the diplomatic service, on top of 14,000 staff. He delivers some polished quips involves holding a baguette in a rustic fashion behind guest star
Lena Headey, but Emma contrives to upstage the star.
These scenes are reminiscent of Ricky Gervais’s Extras, up to the point where they aren’t — that’s the bit where the plot abandons decorum entirely.
There are some lovely touches around the edges — the make-up woman wearing two pairs of glasses, and a running gag about a balloon nose in which Gérard Depardieu is implicated.
As a character, Emma is a true grotesque; a series of immature impulses in an adult’s body.
Meanwhile, back at the office, Nigel (Julian Barratt) does some sterling work with a milk-frother…