Like HBO’s Succession, a drama clearly inspired by Rupert Murdoch and his family, Jamie Roberts’ documentary series about the media tycoon (14 July, 9pm) involves much back-stabbing and ruthless ambition; several loyal but ultimately expendable henchmen and women; pots of money; and at least one yacht. There, however, the similarities end. Come to these films expecting glamour and you might be disappointed. Watching footage of middle-aged media executives arrive at Hayman Island off the coast of Queensland for News Corp’s notorious 1995 conference, I could only gaze in awe at their chewing gum skin, limp ties and appalling chinos. You’d have thought they were attending a pie and pea supper in support of their local Rotary Club, not a make-or-break event on a tropical island belonging to one of the world’s most powerful men.
And who’s this, also blinking in the Aussie sunshine, tufty of hair and big of tooth? Yes, it’s none other than Tony Blair, who began his efforts to seal a deal with Murdoch at the very same extravaganza: as Alastair Campbell reveals, from this point on, Murdoch declared, the two of them would be like a pair of “porcupines, making love slowly and carefully” (until, one assumes, they reached simultaneous orgasm in the form of the Sun’s support for Labour). Roberts’ interviewees are pretty acute about what Andrew Neil, the editor of the Sunday Times under Murdoch, calls the “incestuous” relationship between New Labour and News UK – and of its labyrinthine consequences. Nigel Farage, for instance, believes that by committing to a referendum on the euro before the 1997 election, Blair paved the way for Brexit. (Farage, incidentally, also reveals that he would not have agreed to be interviewed for this series had not Murdoch given him his blessing.) But, however troubling, all this is fairly well-trod ground.
Content from our partners
