CHRISTOPHER STEVENS: ITV’s take on the Stonehouse saga provides a jaunty portrait of the chancer
These days, John Stonehouse MP wouldn’t have to fake his own death. Facing bankruptcy, his political career in tatters, and his marriage on the brink, he could rehabilitate himself simply by going on I’m A Celebrity.
There’s a hint of I’m A Celeb’s Matt Hancock on Stonehouse (ITV), with Matthew Macfadyen as the opportunistic stuntman once tipped to be a future Labor PM.
He’s so unbearably smug, so selfish and egotistical…not to mention lecherous.
One moment sums it up perfectly, when he sits with his secretary Sheila (Emer Heatley) in the theater, greedily dipping into his popcorn, until she grabs the box and hogs it for him without so much as looking. in her
Matthew MacFadyen as John Stonehouse, Keeley Hawes as Barbara Stonehouse and Emer Heatley as Sheila Buckley
It’s amazing that Stonehouse has had a political career as long as he has. It doesn’t matter fooling the spies while he was spying for the Czech security agency: a group of Boy Scouts could have caught him by a wrong ‘un’.
Continuing tonight and tomorrow, this three-part drama is gleefully tongue-in-cheek, played for fun and laughs, set to a foxtrot soundtrack that bounces straight out of Jeeves and Wooster.
It’s kind of a missed opportunity, because Mrs. Stonehouse is played by Macfadyen’s real-life wife, Keeley Hawes, the first time they’ve acted together on TV since Spooks, the 2000s spy adventure where they first met. .
Both are actors of deceptive depth. Fans of HBO’s Succession know that Macfadyen is fascinating as pathetic, conniving executive Tom Wambsgans, who survives every radioactive scandal and scurries around like a cockroach.
Stonehouse with his wife Barbara at a press conference months after his escape
And Hawes is unique in her ability to be a mom in one role, as The Durrells’ matriarch Louisa, and icily glamorous in the next, as the overly sexual Home Secretary in Bodyguard, for example.
Together, they might have delivered an excoriating portrait of a political marriage: the unspoken blackmail, the delicate balance of power, like two little dancers twirling on a dynamite-filled music box.
None of that is attempted here. Barbara Stonehouse is clearly much smarter than her husband, but she chooses not to know what she is doing. When she finds him stowing suitcases in the bedroom closet or arguing quietly with the police on the phone, she remains mute… though the clouds of suspicion on her face speak volumes.
Keeley’s best silence comes when she is first introduced to Sheila. Stonehouse looks strangely guilty for a moment, then decides he got away with it. The ice in his wife’s eyes tells us that she knows exactly what is going on.
We have to pity her, because Stonehouse is such a pompous jerk it’s hard for him to care what happens to him. His downfall begins on a 1960s trade mission to Czechoslovakia, when his sultry translator declares over dinner that she is itching for his unbridled masculine charisma.
The next morning, Czech undercover agents take Stonehouse aside and show him explicit footage of the hotel room, apparently filmed through a peephole in the ceiling. The Soviets had a word for movies like that: Kompromat. Mr. Stonehouse didn’t need a translation.
But her reaction to his proposal betrayed both her stupidity and her cheap venality: ‘Do you want me to spy for you? Would they pay me?
Whether for legal reasons or simply because it’s funnier, the drama makes it clear that Stonehouse didn’t betray anything of importance to the Eastern Bloc. The best scoop on him was the plans for the Concorde, which had already been announced by the French media.
“You are the worst spy I have ever come across,” complains his Czech supervisor. It’s certainly not Kim Philby. Arriving at the Czech embassy to deliver another batch of no-secrets, he yells into the intercom at the front door: ‘I’m John Stonehouse. Agent Twister!
Prime Minister Harold Wilson (Kevin McNally) is also clueless. He has a couple of sensational lines: one about the Queen’s opinion of socialist Tony Benn (“Frankly, I’ve never heard her so upset”) and another about the general lack of sexiness on the Labor front.
His wife Mary thinks most men look like battered saucepans. That must be why Private Eye, in the 1970s, referred to the government as Harold’s kitchen cabinet.
Margaret Thatcher makes a cameo appearance, with only one line of dialogue. At least she’s played by one woman, actress Devon Black. That’s an improvement on C4’s execrable Prince Andrew: The Musical last week… when the iron lady was played by drag queen Baga Chipz.