Steve Coogan and Harriet Walter continue to clash in a political drama that still fails to deliver. Hereās our Brian And Maggie episode 2 review.
…sentence. If you’re joining us halfway through, get caught up on the first part of our Brian And Maggie review here. This will make slightly less sense without it.
Where we were? At the start of round two of Channel 4’s two-part drama, we’re more-or-less back where we started. Once again we see a clip from the duo’s titanic clash in 1989 – once again we’re whizzed back a few years, this time to 1985, where Nigel Lawson is asking his boss for a chat about the Exchange Rate Mechanism, and Brian is winning a very nice award.
Itās not long, however, before the pair are thrown back into their chummy interviewer/interviewee dance. Just a few minutes and two in-programme years later, Brian is being convinced to come out of retirement for another shot at a newly vulnerable sparring partner. It’s a time jump that only makes the decision to turn the story into two 50-minute episodes, rather than a single 90-minute special, all the odder, because it robs the telling of all the pace a good political drama needs.
Anyway, pretty soon we come to the moment everyone’s here for, as Thatcher prepares for the on-air sucker-punch she doesn’t yet know is coming. While the interview itself is well-staged – Coogan and Walter’s impressive grasp of their subjects’ mannerisms really come into their own – the emotion around it never quite lands. We’re told through dialogue that Walden is a brilliant interviewer, but before now, we’ve not been given the chance to see it. We’re told that “no-one’s seen Thatcher like this” after an on-air stumble which, conversely, we have just been shown. It all reeks of a story hammered into the wrong shape – and without giving us much chance to get under the skin of its central relationship either.
Whether Brian And Maggie could have benefited more from one more part, to get us more acquainted with its characters, or one fewer, to press fast-forward on the pace, we’ll never know. But whatever form the programme should have been, it sadly wasn’t this one.
Brian And Maggie is available to stream on Channel 4 from 29th January.