Any die-hard fans missing my daily appearances on Sky News will be pleased to hear that I’ve just embarked on a theatrical tour of the provinces. Starting this week in Peterborough and then on to Chesterfield, Hull, Blackpool, Lichfield, Newcastle upon Tyne, Guildford, Eastbourne and Coventry.
Over the next few months, I’m appearing as a version of myself, the man on the telly, in Dead Lies, a new political drama by the acclaimed crime writer Hilary Bonner. It is a live drama, but, unlike the cast, I do not have to travel; my small contribution is on screen and tape.
It is not my first out of body dramatic appearance. Among other cameos, I once featured in Spooks, spurring on the plot with my commentary on a TV set in an adulterous politician’s bedroom.
Westminster has become almost as familiar a location for political dramas and thrillers as country houses and trains. The political world places an accessible rack of ingredients featuring power, ambition and good and bad behaviour at the disposal of writers and producers.
The formula has become wearily familiar, at least since Paula Milne’s 1995 series The Politician’s Wife. Some of the dramas made to the formula are successful, and some are not. Some entertain and inform, and others are simply trite.
The latest political drama series Anatomy of a Scandal could be Exhibit A to explain why Netflix is losing subscribers. For all the high production values and dollars spent on it, Anatomy of a Scandal simply isn’t worth the time of day even though many of us have wasted hours on it, making it one of the most-watched shows on the network.
In his review in The Guardian, Stuart Heritage says, “Anatomy of a Scandal represents the latest step in David E Kelley’s malicious plan to churn out more obnoxious hour-long dramas about objectively awful rich people than anyone else in history”.
You might expect it to appeal to its target audience at the paper then, but no. Heritage dismisses the show as “dreadful and hilarious”. Other Westminster veterans, including Sasha Swire and Salma Shah, found little interest in it. It clambers just over 50 per cent approval on Rotten Tomatoes and on other rating trackers.
Anatomy of a Scandal chucks all the clichés into the pot: a charismatic, cheating politician with several dark secrets, the elegant wife who stands by him, property-porn living quarters, a coarse and cynical Alastair Campbellesque spin doctor, a stolid but corrupt Prime Minister and every car journey passing through Parliament Square.
This is spiced up with topical concerns such as #MeToo and ex-Bullingdon Club posh boys (cleverly disguised here as members of “The Libertines”).
Just in case the main dish isn’t appetising enough, two other formulas are also on the Anatomy of a Scandal menu: courtroom drama and golden youth. Except the courtroom scenes aren’t dramatic and are predicated on the main barrister breaking Law School Rule 101 and changing identity (please!).
The Oxford in which silk-tailcoated young men clatter about at night is entirely devoid of other people, porters, locked gates or curfews. All of which forced the clubs to shift their revels off college premises as long ago as the 1970s, as portrayed accurately in Laura Wade’s perceptive play Posh and film The Riot Club.
The problem is that Anatomy of a Scandal is not interested in any of the storylines it picks up; they are merely lurid backdrops to a flaccid if well-acted, plot.
The best political dramas have something to say about politics and draw much of their emotional charge from the driving political passions of their protagonists. The playwright David Hare’s work illustrates both sides of this divide.
Absence of War, his moving fictionalised commentary of the 1992 British General Election, is among his best work, but his TV series Collateral and Roadkill were schlock on a par with Anatomy of a Scandal. It’s not enough just to keep imagining very naughty Tories.
A roster of political journalists have made the mistake of turning to fiction, thinking that the goings-on at Westminster they have observed are inherently glamourous and exciting. Their names on the spine at least get their books published, but much more is required than that to make their stories breathe.
Michael Dobbs brought an ad man’s detachment and a love of history and institutions to House of Cards. His work was greatly enhanced by its adaptors to the screen, but Dobb’s essential fascination with politics remains its driving force.
James Graham is the best political playwright of our times because political instincts are not worn like accessories by his characters but are the subject matter for works such as This House, Brexit: The Uncivil War and Labour of Love. As Graham has shown, fact, or a version of it, often provides a better framework than fiction.
The former gossip columnist Tim Walker recently scored a theatrical hit at the Riverside Studios with a subject that would have been for nerds only in less skilful hands. Bloody Difficult Women dramatises the interplay between Prime Minister Theresa May, the campaigner Gina Miller and the Tory press.
In search of artistic freedom, or perhaps for legal reasons, some of the best dramas are set in parallel worlds. Anatomy uses the political world as an inanimate prop, but in better tales, the characters inhabit it. They are in it and of it, and, as with Succession, it is a milieu to which the audience relates.
Anthony Trollope wrote some of the best political novels ever. The Duke of Omnium and Phineas Finn have no precise historical analogues. Yet Trollope explores some of the pressing issues of Victorian politics and the corrupting effect of power by blending it with the fictional lives and loves of his characters.
The wily journalist turned bestseller Robert Harris is very familiar with British politics and politicians, but he has largely preferred to stick with historical subjects. The exception is The Ghost, a jeu d’esprit and extrapolation on Tony Blair. When the then Prime Minister heard about his old friend’s forthcoming book his comment was “the cheeky f**k!”.
Recent Prime Ministers have provided irresistible models for fictional avatars in political dramas. David Cameron in Anatomy of a Scandal, a kind of Thatcher on speed in Years and Years and Blair in the two series of Cobra on Sky.
Cobra dealt with potential tech calamities. Later this year, viewers can look forward to Peter Kosminsky’s The Undeclared War. Adrian Lester, as Britain’s first black Prime Minister, will join the team which adapted Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall novels to take on a pandemic and cyberwar. These stories have a point other than human melodrama.
Borgen, the alternative West Wing of Danish politics, is also making a comeback. I look forward to seeing myself in Dead Lives, a brave post-pandemic revival of touring theatre – when it comes within striking distance of Westminster.
Verisimilitude is the answer.