Brian and Maggie: Harriet Walter 'captures the essence' of Margaret Thatcher

Harriet Walter and Steve Coogan in Brian and Maggie. — Steve Coogan and Harriet Walter as Brian Walden and Margaret Thatcher

(Image credit: Channel 4)

Two days after the shock resignation of her chancellor, Nigel Lawson, in 1989, "Margaret Thatcher sat down for what she thought would be a straightforward TV interview", said Dan Einav in the Financial Times. The man opposite her, Brian Walden, was a friend, but when the camera started rolling, the PM "found herself facing a tenacious interrogator rather than a sympathetic ally".

The interview is the subject of this two-part Channel 4 drama by James Graham, and starring Harriet Walter and Steve Coogan. A parable about "the perils of mixing personal and political life", it faithfully recreates the interview itself, but becomes rather "stilted and overwritten" elsewhere, "with a stagy feel [that] leaves you wondering whether it might have been more impactful as a play".

Walter is ten years older than Thatcher was at the time of the interview, which did bother me initially, said Carol Midgley in The Times. But with her demeanour, her haughty smile "and that voice", Walter "captures the essence of Thatcher possibly more than any other actress I've seen", without "the caricature, the handbags and the exaggerated deep voice that you see so often". Coogan, too, is superb: he gets Walden's "gentle rhotacism just right".