Television: 'A Very British Coup' (1988)

It's downright unsettling. I can't write about the Chris Mullins novel that forms this basis of this Channel 4 mini-series, as I haven't read it, but the lengths to which private interests go to maintain the status quo in this story about a socialist prime minister coming into power is deeply unsettling. It's true that the new government in question is a little blunt and extreme in its methods, but you can't help but wonder just what it would take for a government to be allowed to change anything in the modern world. Is it possible at all?

It's difficult to write about politics when you're fundamentally neutral in a right-wing country, so let's talk about the show itself. It was adapted from the source novel by the magnificent Alan Plater, which is a ringing endorsement in itself, and has one of the most solid casts you could assemble from the British acting corps of the time. Ray McAnally necessarily stands out as Prime Minister Harry Perkins, as does Keith Allen as his press secretary Thompson, but the batting runs very deeply indeed.

The tone is bleak, with hints of dark humour, and no punches are pulled in what hard tactics would need to be employed for a left-wing government to get anything at all done while facing the official opposition, as well as the unofficial, in the form of hostile press barons, the civil service, the secret service, the United States of America, and practically anyone else who thinks they might lose from a new system in Britain. As Perkins progresses in attempts to do the things on the mandated manifesto, it goes from bad to worse. Assassinations begin to happen, conspiracies unwind in the darkness, and finally the most perfidious kinds of blackmail unfurl against the backdrop of an implied military coup.

The television adaptation is pumped up a little in emphasis by the insistence on closing US bases in Britain, and on nuclear disarmament, both of which strengthen American paranoia within the plot. The underlying question, which is not necessarily a partisan one, is who rules the country? Is it the elected government, or the unelected one?

Deeply unsettling, and now prescient. What would happen if today's Labour party got into power? Would they be allowed to do anything at all?

O.