Television
The history of now
Published 28 June 2007
This is the definitive documentary about the Blair era - for the moment, at least
The Rise and Fall of Tony Blair
Channel 4
Brilliant as he is, television's most accomplished political documentary-maker, the BBC's Michael Cockerell, won't go on for ever. So who will inherit his mantle? The journalist Andrew Rawnsley and his director Rob Coldstream have put in a serious bid with their ambitious two-part series, The Rise and Fall of Tony Blair (Saturday 23 June, 7pm and Monday 25 June, 8pm). Rawnsley is a master of the interviewer's greatest skill: he knows that silence is worth a thousand interruptions. He listens and listens, and when the revelation eventually comes, his face speaks only of mild interest.
I admire this very much. I'm also violently envious of his contacts book, which is as epic as Paradise Lost. It was, however, unwise of Coldstream to trill his delight at both of these attributes in a blog on a newspaper website before the films had even screened. Not only did he sound boastful but, as an investment in the future, it's best not to alert people to the fact that you long for them to "cough". Nor is it gentlemanly to describe one of your most canary-like interviewees - the Blairs' friend, Barry Cox - as looking like "a warm-up artist for a Blackpool cabaret". Do your work, let it speak for you, then move on quietly.
Cockerell, of course, had his own go at Blair's premiership last February, in Blair: the Inside Story. That series was more nuanced than Rawnsley's, largely because Cockerell had spent months filming inside No 10. The Rise and Fall of Tony Blair, by contrast, relied entirely on talking heads to bolster its amazing narrative sweep. Luckily, these were quite some talking heads. The aforementioned Cox, who told us of Peter Mandelson's "almost homo-erotic admiration" for Blair, was certainly a star when it came to gossipy incontinence - to a degree where I began to wonder whether someone hadn't sanctioned him to let rip (if this is not the case, you can only wonder, yet again, at the Blairs' judgement when it comes to friendship; if one of my close friends acted in such a way, I'd hurl my Le Creuset saucepans at their bay windows).
But even Cox was upstaged by Peter Mandelson who, though he coyly feigned discretion, refusing to tell Rawnsley exactly what Blair said to him the second time he sacked him from the cabinet, also had his faithful boning knife to hand. Blair had told him that the plan for postwar Iraq was the responsibility of the Americans. "Well, I'm afraid that, as we now see, wasn't good enough," said Mandelson, tartly.
Blair and Brown's dysfunctional relationship was deftly stitched into Rawnsley's script. He dished up a new low with the revelation that, on the day of the Commons vote on tuition fees in 2004, Blair did not know if Brown's supporters would back him (I'm still not sure which of the two this fact makes me despise the most). But for me, Rawnsley's chief triumph was the way he made explicit the connection between what Blair achieved in Kosovo and his support for the US invasion of Iraq; and the way he induced so many high-level advisers, leading supporters and fellow politicians to admit fully what a giant cock-up Iraq was. From the outside, this is harder to pull off than you might imagine.
Recently, I spent several weeks interviewing Labour MPs, and not one admitted to any sense of shame or despair about Iraq, yet here was Margaret Jay, the former Leader of the House of Lords, referring to it as a "tragedy", and Stephen Wall, Blair's former European adviser, dryly commenting that "Jacques [Chirac, who vetoed military action at the UN] got it rather better than we did". The relief! On the subject of post-invasion planning, no one had anything positive to say.
It's immensely difficult to attempt to write history before the period in question has come fully to an end, and then to unroll this combination of high drama and analysis in only three hours of television. But The Rise and Fall of Tony Blair felt definitive, at least for now. It also, with another eye on the future, sneakily planted several timebombs. Brown, we learned, considered the war a bad idea. He wanted to "explode" with rage at the very thought of it. But did he say "no"? He did not.
Pick of the week
Doctor Who
Saturday, 7.05pm, BBC1
The finale for series three. Get behind the sofa.
The South Bank Show
Sunday, 10.45pm, ITV1
Architect Zaha Hadid gives viewers a peek at her sketchbook.
The Thick Of It
Tuesday, 9pm, BBC4
Expletively funny political spin show from Alan Partridge's co-creator.
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