Stonehouse review: a fun drama about the MP who faked his own death

This “fun and funny” three-part ITV drama recounts the “brief rise and astonishing fall” of John Stonehouse, the Labour MP who famously faked his own death in 1974 and fled to Australia, said Rebecca Nicholson in The Guardian.

Matthew Macfadyen plays Stonehouse as a “heedless buffoon”: in the Commons, he parrots what Harold Wilson says; “at home, he parrots what his wife, Barbara (played by Macfadyen’s real-life wife, Keeley Hawes), says”. When he is recruited as a spy, he proves so useless, his Czech handler barks at one point: “You are the worst spy I have ever come across. Ever!”

Written by John Preston (The Dig; A Very English Scandal), the series canters along at a satisfying clip, and makes for “enormously entertaining”, high-spirited TV.

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I found Stonehouse “a joy, chiefly thanks to Macfadyen’s witty, light-on-its-feet performance”, said Carol Midgley in The Times. The drama’s “frisky vibe” recalls that of the “excellent” television adaptation of A Very English Scandal, about Jeremy Thorpe. To my mind, this is just the sort of “lifter” we need in January.

Stonehouse is “very funny”, agreed Hugo Rifkind in the same paper, but I can’t help feeling that its “camply satirical tone” rather drains it of meaning. Was Stonehouse really a “floundering tosspot, only unnoticed because he was living in a Westminster version of Abigail’s Party where everyone else was a floundering tosspot”? Or was the truth more nuanced? The series is “good fun. But I don’t think I understand the man any better.”