Biggest Fans

Coogan plays Brian Walden in Brian and Maggie, a Channel 4 series which dramatises their famous 1989 television interview. Dame Harriet Walter, who stars opposite him as Thatcher, is not a fan either. The ex-Prime Minister was a bad role model for women, said the actress, who described herself as Left-wing. She and Coogan met while attending Extinction Rebellion events.

Interviewed by Emily Maitlis in this week's Radio Times, Coogan said: "Of course, I had huge antipathy towards Thatcher. I was very anti-Thatcher. And the one thing I was worried about in this drama was being too compassionate because of her legacy... In fact, in the edit we cut something because I thought it was a bit too kind and we wanted to remind people that there was this damage.
"She had vision and zeal, but she lacked empathy. Now, she'd probably be diagnosed with some sort of disorder."

Coogan said he was interested in Thatcher's "outsider" status as a member of the lower middle classes, and also argued that she was "definitely a victim of sexism, whether she knew it or not".

Dame Harriet said she was drawn to the project because of the team behind it: Coogan, writer James Graham and director Stephen Frears. But she had reservations: "I just wish it was about somebody else." However, she thought the quality of Graham's writing was so good that she decided "to swallow hard and go for it".

The magazine article described her as "musing gleefully" on how awkward it would have been if the actress and Thatcher had ever met.
"I think she would have detested me. I'm domestically impractical, politically Left-wing and thoroughly unreliable. In my youth, I went on demos and picket lines. Plus, my coming from a fairly privileged background. We would have had zero to talk about. Maybe clothes, I suppose," Dame Harriet said.

"I didn't warm to her. She remains unchallenged as a role model for female politicians in this country and that's regrettable, because I don't think it's a very nice role model."

The two-part drama, which launches on January 29, charts the relationship between Walden and Thatcher over the course of several encounters, culminating in the 1989 interview for LWT. Thatcher is said to have felt betrayed by Walden, the Labour MP-turned grand inquisitor, whom she considered to be a friend. The interview took place three days after the resignation of her chancellor, Nigel Lawson, and hastened Thatcher's political demise. Walden accused her of coming across as "authoritarian, domineering, refusing to listen to anybody else", to which Thatcher replied: "Brian, if anyone is coming over as domineering in this interview, it is you."
James Graham, whose television credits include Sherwood and Brexit: The Uncivil War, said Thatcher was an impressive interviewee in comparison to today's politicians.

"If you ran any of her interviews with Walden alongside anything Liz Truss did on screen, it's embarrassing," he said.
The drama is based on a chapter in Why Is This Lying B—d Lying To Me?, a book by Rob Burley, formerly editor of live political programmes at the BBC, and is made by Baby Cow Productions, a production company founded by Coogan and Henry Normal.

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Blagged content with a side of order tory wankery from the Telegraph. I'll post the full Radio Times interview tomorrow, hopefully.

The pages from this week's Radio Times.

Steve Coogan on Brian and Maggie [Chortle interview (https://www.chortle.co.uk/interviews/2025/01/22/57353/im_an_example_of_the_thatcherite_model_of_success)]

Brian and Maggie, a two-part drama coming to Channel 4 next week, explores the breakdown of the unlikely friendship between veteran political inquisitor Brian Walden and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher over a bombshell interview in 1989. Here Steve Coogan, who plays the journalist and whose company Baby Cow Productions, made the show, speaks about how it came about, how he had to combat his own anti-Thatcher sentiment, and how he now reluctantly admires her drive as an outsider with determination to bring about change...

How did the idea of Brian and Maggie come about?

I got a message from Rob Burley, who used to produce the Andrew Marr show and who wrote a book called Why Is This Lying Bastard Lying To Me? about the history of the political interview. In that book, he came across this quite meaningful friendship between Brian Walden and Margaret Thatcher which he said was quite an interesting story.

He then said to me that he thought I should make it into a TV show and said: 'You should play Brian Walden'. So, Sarah [Monteith, chief executive of Coogan's production company Baby Cow] and I went for lunch with Ian Katz from Channel 4 and we pitched various things to him. As we were leaving, I said: 'Oh, there is one more thing. It's about Brian Walden and Margaret Thatcher' and he immediately said: 'Oh, I want that'.

I then called [writer' James Graham and asked him if he would do it. He said it was right up his street and he set about it fairly soon after that. There were fits and starts along the way, but James took to it like a duck to water.

The story to me was a fascinating one, which was this political love story of sorts between a disillusioned Labour politician and Margaret Thatcher, who was quite a radical politician at the time.

The two of them were outsiders and that's what attracted them to each other, above and beyond their political views. I think Brian was naturally on the left, from a working-class background, and Margaret Thatcher as well was from the lower middle class, the small tradespeople background.

Then we had to then find a Margaret Thatcher. When Dame Harriet Walter agreed, I was very happy indeed. We wanted a heavy hitter and someone who could own Margaret Thatcher, because it's sort of become a genre in itself [playing Thatcher] - like actresses giving their Lady Macbeth.

Brian and Maggie was written as a two-hander, this sort of sparring and dance that Brian and Margaret do around each other. Also to add to the mix was the fact that the historical context means that we now have some distance between ourselves and the Thatcher period... and it's now clearer to see it as an era and see her as a phenomenon and look at her legacy in a slightly different way.

Personally, I found her to be a very divisive figure and I think that she did untold damage to the notion of community and the idea of people helping each other and I think that was diametrically opposed and phrased by my parents as the philosophy of 'I'm all right Jack'. It was the idea of 'help yourself and don't help others' and I find that objectionable.

I must put this caveat in here. The legacy of Thatcher – which is re-written by her admirers now as if she was the heroine – certainly for the Conservative Party forgets that they deposed her themselves.

But I don't agree with this rewriting of that history, her experiment in privatising all these utilities. It was no doubt that Britain needed someone to grab it by the scruff of the neck but in so doing, she threw the baby out with the bathwater because the idea of the post-war consensus of rebuilding Britain as working together as a community to make lives better for all of all was jettisoned by Margaret Thatcher and that is something I found unforgivable.

However, having said that, the fact that she was an outsider makes her a fascinating figure to me, more fascinating with the passage of time because of the antipathy and contempt with which I regarded her at the time.

Now looking back, I look at her with a slightly different lens which is that of an outsider looking to make radical change. I don't agree with the radical changes, but the fact that she had radical approach I think is good. She had a point of view and wanted to do things differently and that is indisputable.

She achieved that at what cost we can all discuss, because I think the cost is too much, but that is something that needs to be recognised.

And on top of that she knew her stuff and she subjected herself on a regular basis, with Brian Walden, to forensic analysis in a way that politicians don't do anymore. There are focus groups etc. They delegate their knowledge and then trot out a briefing, but they don't have a full grasp of the facts and she undoubtably did. You have to acknowledge that, and I do.

Sorry, that is the longest single answer I have ever given to a question!

Were you familiar with Brian Walden and his interview technique?

Yes, I was. I grew up knowing all about Brian Walden - he was a radical in so far as he did this long-form interview... [it] which was a more prestigious sort of single interview.

I remember when he took over on Weekend World because I used to watch it anyway when I was  around 11 years old, I was quite  an avaricious consumer of politics at the time. The whole period of the 1980s was incredibly colourful. Even though I was anti-Thatcher, the characters in the Cabinet, it was all very vibrant and an interesting time.

So I was very familiar with Brian Walden and in fact I did his voice on Spitting Image more than 30 years ago when I started out in the business.

What research did you do to get into character?

I already felt I knew who he was, and I found I had a kind of empathy with Brian Walden – and to some extent with Margaret Thatcher.

Although showbusiness is slightly different from academia or high-end politics, entertainment is more meritocratic - if you are good, you should get on. You need breaks, you need luck and you need talent, but the notion of being successful through hard work is a very Thatcherite sort of thing and I have a successful company now, so in some ways I am an example of the Thatcherite model of material success even though I have other concerns and I like to think I am community minded, more philanthropic, more egalitarian.

However, what really interests me is the paradox that she and Brian Walden were outside of the establishment, which I identify with. I feel comfortable being outside the establishment, but I want to succeed in a way that the establishment has to acknowledge, and I think Brian Walden and Margaret Thatcher felt the same - which allows me to have empathy for both of them in that regard.

I watched all the interviews Brian did with Thatcher which is interesting in itself, to see the arc of their political relationship, and see her develop as a politician and him develop as an interrogator - it's all very interesting psychologically. I read a lot of interviews as well and submerged myself in all the things you should do if you are playing a part, particularly that of a real person. I have now played 12 real people in my career.

Why do you feel this story is relevant today?

Post-war consensus was interrupted by Margaret Thatcher and her ideology. We can now look at it through the lens of history and see it in its proper context; that she came along and shook things because they were getting tired.

The post-war dream of rebuilding Britain, the community-minded effort had soured slightly, there were all kinds of discordant relationships between the Labour Party and the unions, they had fallen out of love. It was like going through some sort of divorce. It felt like it was in constant strife. Constant tension pulling one way and then another and therefore no forward momentum and what she brought was this radical agenda which ruptured and drew a line under the post-war consensus.

The point is we can now look at this story and see where she sits in history and how we arrived to where we are now, so that's important and that's why it's relevant. People need to understand what it was she represented and why it was radical and divisive.

But it's interesting purely on a human level because people who achieve success are fascinating and interesting. I also think it has resonance because the establishment is more in control than it was before, so there was a window of opportunity where people from modest backgrounds broke through in all walks of life. It seems to me that that has regressed.

Do you feel the disappearance of the full-length political TV interview puts democracy at risk?

I would say it's dramatic to say that it puts democracy at risk. But I do think short form interviews do not help proper discussion and you see this online.

They are short clips where people fight each other in interviews and things are broken down into very simple binary choices. We know life isn't like that in reality. It shouldn't be. All arguments ultimately have some nuance about them.

You can only get into the nitty-gritty of a conversation by subjecting yourself to proper scrutiny which politicians don't do any more. To Thatcher's credit, she did and lots of other politicians did too. People like Tony Benn and Dennis Healy were quite happy to subject themselves to cross-examination and that has pretty much gone.

However, the problem is people's attention span, so therefore [a return to those days] looks unlikely. But it does make you look back misty-eyed at a time when people did their homework, whatever their political colours.

What was it like working opposite Harriet Walter as Margaret Thatcher?

She is at the top of her game, she is an acting giant. I did say to her that we had worked together before, at the Royal Exchange [in Manchester] in 1986 and that I was a stagehand who flew in lamps on to the stage. However, because it was a revolving stage, which I failed to revolve one night, I left her stranded... But she says she doesn't have any recollection of that! Of course, it's haunted me for years.

In terms of the character, Harriet played her incredibly well because she captured the essence of Thatcher, beyond just the aesthetic. She didn't just do an impersonation; she got to the root of who she was.

Harriet and I are both politically antipathetic to Margaret Thatcher, but we didn't want to do a hatchet job. If anything, we were in danger of going the other way in trying to fight against our impulses.

It's a testament to Harriet that she totally respected the brief of getting inside Thatcher's head. She did a brilliant job, and it was a huge opportunity for me to work opposite her. It's demanding because she's so seasoned and I'm this weird hybrid with a background in comedy, but also someone who does a bit of drama. So I had to step up. So, I thank her for raising my game.

If you could describe the show in four words, what would you say?

Ooh, crikey. I would say.. love, duty, ideology, friendship.

• Brian and Maggie is on Channel 4 at 9pm next Wednesday, January 29, with episode two streaming straight afterwards, and airing on TV at the same time the following night

Published: 22 Jan 2025

Quote from: Miguel Wilkins on Jan 22, 2025, 12:15 PMThe pages from this week's Radio Times.

Steve's dream to be interviewed by Emily Maitlis

That was a great bit of chinwagging there.

By combining an irreverent screenplay with reverence for the bands it features – Joy Division, A Certain Ratio, New Order, and Happy Mondays – the film deftly tiptoes the line between lightheartedness and profundity.

We grow so fond of our protagonist, Tony Wilson, the club owner and record label boss, that we forgive his missteps and the lies he tells to minimise them.

Wonderfully rendered by Steve Coogan, Wilson is a confidence man who persuades himself as well as the people he is trying to con.

It's his voiceover narration that makes 24 Hour Party People special.

Not only does he tell the story of how Manchester was transformed from a decaying backwater into a centre of global music culture – while placing himself squarely in the bullseye – he also draws attention to the sleights of hand that storytellers use to make a point.

Although we are meant to understand that Wilson's heart was in the right place, the way he glides effortlessly from objectively verifiable events to outright fabrication imparts a disturbing aspect to the film.

Over and over, Wilson breaks the fourth wall to cast doubt on something he has said, making it clear that he is an unreliable narrator.

The extreme self-reflexivity of his tale helps us to perceive its seductive power. Even when he confesses to deceit, we still want to believe him.

One of the best examples comes early in the film. While pointing out some of the soon-to-be-significant individuals in the small crowd that attended the Sex Pistols' first show in Manchester, Wilson mentions that Buzzcocks' co-founder Howard Devoto would go on to sleep with his wife, Lindsay.

A little later, after Lindsay discovers him with a prostitute outside his first club, we see him go back inside to look for her. After he finds her having sex with Devoto in a toilet stall, he asks for the keys and walks out.

Instead of following Wilson, the camera lingers on the lavatory attendant standing at the sink, who declares, "I definitely don't remember this happening." At this point, the frame freezes, and we hear Wilson's voice.

"This is the real Howard Devoto," he begins. "He and Lindsay insisted that we make clear that this never happened. But I agree with John Ford. When you have to choose between the truth and the legend, print the legend."

The role of the voice-over narration is frequently more subtle.

During a sequence in which we see Joy Division performing "Transmission", culminating in Ian Curtis having an epileptic fit, Wilson sutures together this staged scene with documentary footage.

At first we see the band playing to an appreciative audience, followed by a shot of Wilson and the band's manager Rob Gretton nodding with approval. But when we cut back to an overhead shot of the crowd, it's apparent that there are numerous skinheads in the crowd performing a Roman salute.

As Curtis's dancing becomes increasingly frenetic, the camera work capturing the crowd does, too, with a canted horizon and lots of shaking.

We then see archival footage of a crowd marching with large Union Jacks as Wilson – now, presumably, in his role as television newscaster – states, "The National Front took to the streets of Manchester today in the biggest demonstration of neo-fascists since the 30s."

More shots of Curtis and the rest of the band follow, along with the increasingly rowdy skinheads, interspersed with footage of Britain in crisis that Wilson's newscaster voice again narrates, culminating with "And now gravediggers in Liverpool refuse to bury the dead."

After Curtis leaves the stage, we see his bandmates trying to help him in a dressing room. As Wilson makes his way backstage, a reporter follows him, asking a probing question: "How do you answer the charge that you're a fascist?" He is referring to the Nazi origins of the name Joy Division.

Wilson's reply distils the narrative approach of the preceding montage and 24 Hour Party People as a whole into a kind of manifesto.

"Have you never heard of Situationism or Postmodernism? Do you know nothing about the free play of signs and signifiers? Yes, we've got a band called Joy Division. We've also got a band called Durutti Column. I'm sure I don't need to point out the irony there."

As the story moves forward, through Ian Curtis's suicide, New Order's rise from the ashes of Joy Division, the creation of the Haçienda club, and finally, the emergence of the rave-happy "Madchester" identified with the drug-addled Happy Mondays, its Wilson's voice-over that sutures everything together, trying to convince us that, as out-of-control as things may have been, the mind capable of fitting them into an overarching theoretical paradigm is still able to transcend the chaos.

The way Tony Wilson breaks character, whether to convey background information or cast doubt on his reliability, makes us keenly aware of the story's retrospective quality. He revisits key events from a vantage point in the future, one which presumably correlates with the film's release.

Although the screenplay predates the War on Terror, it's not hard to perceive a connection between his glib storytelling and that of another Tony, the affable and eloquent prime minister who would go on to provide credibility to the warmongering of George W. Bush's White House.

This is not to imply that 24 Hour Party People is making this analogy deliberately. Rather, the film provides us with the tools required to second-guess the statements of people who have the power of persuasion.

From one perspective, the film almost seems to be suggesting that the roughly fifteen years it covers, ending in the early 1990s, laid the groundwork for the outwardly very different world in which it was released.

Winterbottom's masterful use of documentary concert footage also helps us understand how easily we can be misled by good storytelling.

Even though it is perfectly obvious that the actors playing members of  Manchester bands are different from those musicians themselves – as exemplified by Howard Devoto's cameo – we are still inclined to suspend disbelief.

Because Wilson's narrator keeps reminding us of the distinction, we are able to sustain a double consciousness, believing the fiction on one level while reflecting on the process of fictionalisation on another.

When 24 Hour Party People came out, social media was in its infancy. So was the technological trickery that makes deep fakes possible.

In a sense, the film was looking into the future as much as the past, to a time when its approach to storytelling would reshape the entire mediascape.

Steve Coogan's performance makes Wilson into a master of seduction, the sort that politicians strive to become.

In Wilson's case, that rhetorical savvy is used for a wholesome purpose, promoting the Manchester scene he made possible. But the techniques he deploys – bending the truth here, inventing incidents there – can just as easily be deployed for sinister ends.

While those of us conversant in cultural theory will be thrilled by Wilson's term-dropping, sober reflection on the state of politics today demonstrates how easily his self-reflexivity can be weaponised by people who do not share his socialist views.

On the contrary, in an era of metastasising populism, it is depressingly clear that many of the most effective storytellers in the 24 Hour Party People mode are political reactionaries.

American Vice President JD Vance, whose Ivy League education is the equivalent of Wilson's degree from Cambridge, used the distortions and fabrications of his Hillbilly Elegy to become one of the most influential politicians today.

And Elon Musk, the world's richest man, has turned the spreading of rumours, stories which feel true even though they aren't, into a dark art.

None of this is meant as a criticism of 24 Hour Party People, which has its heart in the right place just as Tony Wilson did.

On the contrary, it's precisely because Michael Winterbottom's film does such a great job of illustrating the power of storytelling that mixes fact with fiction and staged scenes with documentary footage that it demands to be seen again now.

That Paramount City episode has the BBC announcer saying "Here's Arthur Smith propping up the bar" - I wonder if that's where the line in IAP came from?

Also, during Coogan's set, he says "he's got a shooter!"

There are two things that can make any movie better: Steve Coogan and penguins. Fortunately, and not surprisingly considering its title, The Penguin Lessons features both. Well, at least one penguin, who goes by the name Juan Salvador. But he's more than enough. He's Coogan's best onscreen partner since Rob Brydon in the Trip movies. Loosely based on a memoir by Tom Michell, the film takes place in 1976 in Buenos Aires, where teacher Tom (Coogan) arrives to teach English to teenage students at a tony private school. His timing wasn't exactly fortuitous, as not long after he gets there the country is rocked by a military coup, with people disappearing subsequently.

Not that any of the tumult affects Tom, who soon embarks on a weekend getaway to Uruguay with his Swedish colleague (Bjorn Gustafsson, priceless), where he enjoys a flirtation with a local woman. Walking together on the beach, they encounter an oil slick and the bodies of several dead penguins. One, however, is still alive. Tom is eager to move on. "There's nothing we can do," he says with mock solemnity. "You can't interfere with nature."

But she implores him to help, and Tom, trying to impress her, agrees to take the penguin back to his hotel room and clean him up. Not only does this attempt at seduction not work, but Tom finds himself stuck with a penguin that won't leave him, even after he throws him back into the ocean. In one of the film's many implausibilities that you just have to go with, he smuggles the bird to Argentina and hides him in his on-campus apartment to avoid the watchful eyes of the school's officious headmaster (Jonathan Pryce).

It's not hard to guess what happens next. Tom, whose cynicism has already been well established, finds himself warming up to the adorable Magellanic penguin (I cop to knowing this from the press notes), working hard to procure fish to feed him and even bringing him to the classroom as a teaching aide. Which naturally does wonders for his bored students, who take a renewed interest in their lessons. And for Tom himself, who previously snuck off for naps during classes but now finds himself teaching with fresh vigor.

The trailer for The Penguin Lessons makes it look like a cutesy comedy, something that might have easily been called "The Dead Penguin's Society." The film is that, to a large degree. But it also attempts something more ambitious with a major plot element involving the disappearance of Sofia (Alfonsina Carrocio), the granddaughter of school housekeeper Maria (Vivian El Jaber), seized off the street by government figures right in front of Tom, who's too terrified to intervene.

We eventually learn the reason for Tom's hard-boiled indifference, involving a tragic incident from his past. With his appreciation for life newly restored by his feathered friend, he soon finds himself in the unlikely position of political activist, using Juan Salvador to strike up a conversation with one of the men who took Sofia and winding up spending a night in jail, beaten up for his troubles.

The film doesn't fully succeed in blending its disparate tones, but under the careful direction of Peter Cattaneo (an old hand at this sort of feel-good material, thanks to such previous efforts as The Full Monty and Military Wives), it emerges as an engaging delight from start to finish. That's partially thanks to the canny screenplay by frequent Coogan collaborator Jeff Pope (Philomena, Stan & Ollie) and partially, no make that majorly, to the superb performance by Coogan, whose expert deadpan comic timing and delivery make the film laugh-out-loud funny at times.

The Penguin Lessons also proves unexpectedly moving, its emotional manipulations fully forgivable. By the time it ends with home-movie footage of the real-life Juan Salvador happily swimming in the school's pool, you'll have fully succumbed to its charms.

Steve Coogan and Ghosts star Charlotte Ritchie have joined the cast of a new Netflix series based on a real-life undercover customs operation.

Legends will also feature Strike star  Tom Burke and  I, Daniel Blake's Hayley Squires and revolves around an audacious plan to infiltrate Britain's most dangerous drug gangs in the 1990s.

The six-part series has been written by Neil Forsyth, who created The Gold for the BBC about a different heist, and which starred Dominic Cooper and Jack Lowden. 

Forsyth previously created the comedy character Bob Servant, as played by  Brian Cox, and  penned Eric, Ernie and Me, a one-off drama about Morecambe and Wise from the point of view of their writer Eddie Braben.

The Netflix logline for the show reads: 'In the early '90s, her Majesty's Customs and Excise was losing its battle with illegal drug smuggling across Britain's borders. The solution was extraordinary. In a top-secret operation, a small team of Customs employees were sent undercover. Their task — to infiltrate Britain's most dangerous drug gangs.

'But these were not trained spies. They were normal men and women, plucked from ordinary lives around the UK, put through a basic training regime, and tasked with building new identities in the criminal underworld. These identities were called legends.'

Legends does not yet have a release date.


Published: 19 Mar 2025
Via Chortle (https://www.chortle.co.uk/news/2025/03/19/57702/steve_coogan_and_charlotte_ritchie_join_crime_drama_legends)