Television
What? No more big African adventures?
Published 03 July 2006
A stupid scheme by greedy public-school boys makes oddly delightful viewing
Coup!
BBC2
They sound like something encrypted by a wonky Enigma machine: Scratcher; The Argentinian; Shaving Kit; Swan Lake; The Pretender; Captain F. The code names were actually for an invasion that never happened. "The Project", to overthrow Teodoro Obiang Nguema, the corrupt, nominally democratic, but in fact absolute ruler of Equatorial Guinea, failed in the most entertaining way possible, with a rakish Old Etonian thrown into an African jail and Mark Thatcher - aka "Scratcher" - convicted, sentenced and banned from entry into the United States. The moral of the story, as told in this entirely delightful comedy-drama by John Fortune, directed by Simon Cellan Jones, is: don't be stupid, don't be greedy and don't get bored.
As the whole plan was stupid and greedy, its only virtue being that it was, at least, not boring, it proved hard for Fortune to assign precise moral failings to his characters. For simplicity's sake, allow me. To Scratcher, I pin the "stupid" label. This 90-minute film (9pm, 30 June) opens with him enjoying polecat coffee (the world's most expensive, on account of the beans being passed through the animals' digestive systems) on the splendid terrace of his house in Cape Town.
Scratcher, a picture of indolence although dressed in one of his several hundred suits, is alarmed to notice that his grounds are being invaded by policemen ready to arrest him for financing the plot. We are asked to believe that he never enquired as to what he was financing. Fortunately, we can believe it.
More financial backing comes from Shaving Kit, otherwise known as Roddy Hamilton, which I take it is a name the BBC lawyers invented to protect the guilty. "Roddy" is a renowned restaurateur, although his gift seems to be for eating and drinking (Rupert Vansittart, playing him, needed to be fatter). Approached at a London club where he cannot quite hear what is being said, Roddy misunderstands almost everything. When the first attempt to storm Malabo airport fails because the invading jet is grounded by bird-strike, Roddy whimsically imagines birds refusing to sing. But even he wonders if 70 men have ever in history taken over an entire country. Unfortunately, he wonders this aloud to James Roxburgh, a former spy who rats on the conspirators to the South African authorities - who then arrest the lot on the tarmac of Harare airport.
The real plan wouldn't even have got that far without Simon Mann, the story's anti-hero. The ex-Eton, ex-Sandhurst son of an England cricket captain, Mann graduated from the SAS to run a security firm that specialised in recruiting mercenaries. He was tempted out of semi-retirement not because he needed the dosh, but because he was bored with his comfortable life in his Hampshire mansion, with only his pneumatic wife and adoring son for acolytes. On screen, it is a magnificent performance by Jared Harris, the very embodiment of a hail-fellow-well-met you wouldn't want to meet without a lawyer by your side.
Long before we discover how the plot finally fails, the film flashes forward to Mann, captive in a Zimbabwean jail, failing to charm his prison guard. There is much talk of betrayal - we see Thatcher refusing to take Mann's lawyer's call on the grounds that he is "busy" watching the Grand Prix - and it is possible that standards of loyalty have slipped among old-school-tie wearers over the past two decades. But I rather doubt it. The reason Mann's scheme crashed was that, forgetting the map of Africa was no longer painted pink, he imagined the centre of the world was still England, if not actually his Beaulieu estate. The black Africans now in charge inspire their own loyalties and knit their own networks. As Mann's interrogator tells him: "A clever man would not play chess in Africa and ignore the black pieces."
Dramas that generate laughter out of living people's misfortunes run the danger of making us feel sorry for some of the players - in this case, if not for Mark Thatcher, then his whisky-gargling mama, and if not for Mann, then his local fixer Nick du Toit, now enduring a 34-year jail term in a hell-hole in Equatorial Guinea. But arrogance is best punctured by ridicule. The script craftily made a passing comparison to Iraq, where, as on the west coast of Africa, the dividends of installing a humanitarian and democratic regime also include the promise of oil money. There was surely an element of ruling-class hubris in that messed-up invasion, too.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times
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