This BBC TV film illustrates the dangers and the limitations of the BBC's individual-centred, hopes-dreams-and-aspirations humanist drama form. We are shown, at person-level, the many unsuccessful attempts of the young Margaret Hilda Thatcher (née Roberts) to secure a seat in Parliament. Along the way, she has to battle prejudice and the old school tie; the local conservative parties were not at all sure about having a woman candidate (would she neglect her kids?) or someone from the lower middle-classes (she was only a grocer's daughter). Structuring the drama as a battle against the odds has the net effect of making the audience cheer when Thatcher finally routs the fuddy-duddies and fogies. Yet hold on a minute - are we really wanting to cheer on the victory of a woman who did so much irreparable damage to society and whose ideologies were extremist, to say the least. Centring the drama around the human struggles of the individual person is a bourgeois strategy at base, and here it is exposed as a celebration of the avarice of a class warrior for power, control and self-interest.
There's no denying that, for the most part, it's gripping if slightly caricatured stuff - caricatured that is apart from Andrea Riseborough's quite extraordinary performance as the protagonist. There are some absolutely pathetic attempts to humorously prefigure later events in the characters' lives (little Mark Thatcher says "Can I go to Africa some day? I won't cause any trouble"). In the final analysis, the piece shows the ideological barrenness of the BBC drama department which churns out these human-centred celebrity biographies like so many sausages in a sausage production line: if you're not going to go any deeper than the trials of individuals winning or losing against the odds, you are a Thatcherist product yourself, believing that "there's no such thing as society, only individual men and women and families."
There's no denying that, for the most part, it's gripping if slightly caricatured stuff - caricatured that is apart from Andrea Riseborough's quite extraordinary performance as the protagonist. There are some absolutely pathetic attempts to humorously prefigure later events in the characters' lives (little Mark Thatcher says "Can I go to Africa some day? I won't cause any trouble"). In the final analysis, the piece shows the ideological barrenness of the BBC drama department which churns out these human-centred celebrity biographies like so many sausages in a sausage production line: if you're not going to go any deeper than the trials of individuals winning or losing against the odds, you are a Thatcherist product yourself, believing that "there's no such thing as society, only individual men and women and families."