She didn’t respond well to his dogged line of questioning and lost her temper. As told in Brian and Maggie – a solidly entertaining two-part dramatisation of the encounter (Channel 4, Wednesday and Thursday, 9pm) – this fired the starter pistol on her ousting from office. Thatcher certainly regarded the conversation as significant – though long-friendly with Walden, they never spoke again after the interview.
There has been no shortage of on-screen Margaret Thatchers in recent years. Meryl Streep played her as a humourless weirdo in The Iron Lady, while Gillian Anderson leant into the cliche of Thatcher as an ice queen with robot-like tendencies in The Crown. In Brian and Maggie Harriet Walter offers another spin on one of Britain’s most consequential leaders.
As with Steve Coogan’s Walden, Thatcher was a lower middle-class striver who came from nothing and has never been allowed to forget it by the posh idiots with whom she must deal each day. “We have to tolerate them,” she confides in Walden. “They bluff and they blag their way through and they have unlimited chances.
If I don’t spend hour after hour preparing every detail ...
you never do shake it off do you – the feeling one has of being an outsider?” [ TV guide: the best new shows to watch Opens in new window ] It’s the perfect articulation of what it’s like to be in a profession historically dominated by the posh and the privileged – and how surprising that it should come from an (albeit s.
