A Very British Coup, episode 1 (Independent Television Service, 1988)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I had on various videos on YouTube, including one on how to avoid CD compilations that advertise “original hits by the original artists” but not the actual original recordings, but either live versions or studio remakes; and another comparing the 1977 LP and 2016 CD of the live record The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl, but my husband Charles wanted to watch something “heavier” and found it in the first episode of A Very British Coup. This was a three-part miniseries produced – oddly, given its political ideology of attacking Margaret Thatcher’s program in general and the privatization of much of Britain’s economy in her 11-year reign in particular – not by the BBC but by the Independent Television Service (ITC), which the Conservative Party had created in the early 1950’s as their attempt to break the previous government-mandated monopoly the publicly owned British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) had had on British radio and TV.

This episode begins with the landslide election of the Labour Party in general and its candidate for Prime Minister, Harry Perkins (Ray McAnnally), in particular. Charles and I both said the show looked like what might have happened if Bernie Sanders had actually been elected President of the United States, since Perkins is an “out” socialist as well as a former trade union leader who takes his total lack of gentlemanly “polish” all too seriously. The first episode deals with Perkins as the proverbial fish out of water, encountering the trappings of power at No. 10 Downing Street (the British equivalent of the White House) and in particular the shadow government – what former (and, all too likely, future) President Donald Trump liked to call the “Deep State” – that has frustrated and successfully blocked every previous Labour Party government from actually implementing its socialist goals. In a line by screenwriter Alan Plater (based on a novel by Chris Mullin) that’s probably the most incisive bit of satire in the film, one of the 1-percenters who are trying to figure out how to stop Perkins from enacting his agenda says, “I’ve been reading Labour Party manifestos since 1945” – when Clement Attlee defeated Winston Churchill and created the first modern Labour government of Britain.

The show deals mainly with Perkins’ attempts to tame the British bureaucracy and achieve at least part of his program, including a meeting with the U.S. Secretary of State who insists that Britain’s becoming a non-aligned country in the Cold War and withdrawing from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) will be considered as hostile acts by the U.S. government. In a grimly funny scene, Perkins asks if any of his private telephone conversations are being recorded, and it turns out they all are: like Richard Nixon’s taping system, which went on and off automatically whenever someone made a phone call or began an in-person meeting, Perkins is actually being “bugged” 24/7 via a bank of Revox tape recorders (did Revox have to pay a product placement fee for their recorders, or did they more cynically agree to loan their equipment to the production in exchange for the exposure?), at least one of which starts when he picks up the phone receiver and doesn’t stop until he hangs up. Though Perkins is still in power at the end of this episode – he’s warned by Wainwright (Geoffrey Beevers), the moderate he appointed to his Cabinet as Chancellor of the Exchequer (essentially Britain’s Secretary of the Treasury) as a token figure to appease the fat cats, that he can’t possibly cover the costs of his expanded social network, but he’s arranged a deal for a loan from the Russians instead of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) so he doesn’t have to deal with those pesky “austerity” restrictions the IMF would insist on that would require him to gut his programs – the stage is clearly being set for the “very British coup” that would remove him.

Charles had seen A Very British Coup 30 years ago (just before we re-met and began our relationship) and he had fond memories of it and talked it up relentlessly, but encountering it again he acknowledged it was dated and had aged badly. Certainly, when the real Russia is threatening an all-out war against Ukraine and the U.S. and Britain are united in opposition (though just how effective their opposition here, since it’s limited so far to economic sanctions and Russia has already endured those from the West for eight years, remains to be seen), it’s hard to see the Russians as white knights agreeing to bail out a sympathetic Prime Minister and his socialist policies. Apparently the writers of this show weren’t anticipating the collapse of the Soviet Union – they still believed Russia would be a Left-wing dictatorship instead of a Right-wing one (which is why so many modern-day U.S. Republicans are A-O.K. with Putin: it wasn’t Russia they hated all those years, it was the Soviet Union, and now that Russia is a Right-wing instead of a Left-wing dictatorship a lot of Republicans are just fine with Putin and his regime). And one thing they assumed was that Queen Elizabeth II would have croaked already, since the dialogue refers to Britain’s reigning monarch as the King instead of the Queen. (Elizabeth II has been Queen of England since before I was born, and I’m 68 years old: in fact she just celebrated the 70th anniversary of her reign, and she long ago surpassed Queen Victoria as Britain’s longest-reigning monarch ever.)

I had suspicions that I wasn’t going to like A Very British Coup as soon as I saw the name of the director: Mick Jackson, the man who did so much to ruin the 1992 film The Bodyguard. I said when Charles and I finally caught up with The Bodyguard that it needed Alfred Hitchcock and got Mick Jackson, who had nothing in common besides a shared British heritage: imagine what Hitchcock could have done with a celebrity being stalked by a mad killer during the Academy Awards, and how little Jackson actually did with it. A Very British Coup shares some of the same nervous editing as The Bodyguard, and while at least Jackson was dealing with a cast of British professionals instead of a neophyte like Whitney Houston who, as Charles said, couldn’t even play herself, he seems to be content with attitude instead of real characterization. Whether it’s the opening shot of Harry Perkins peeing (we don’t actually see urine come of his dick, but we hear it and see his toilet bowl filling with yellow liquid) or the bizarre quotes from A Hard Day’s Night of crowds mobbing the train that’s supposed to be taking Perkins to London from his working-class home in Sheffield, Mick Jackson turns out to be a dubious director and if A Very British Coup has any high points (which it does, though less in the direction than the writing and acting), it’s in spite of the director rather than due to him.