Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Two days after the shock resignation of her chancellor Nigel Lawson in October 1989, Margaret Thatcher sat down for what she thought would be a straightforward TV interview. The man opposite her, Brian Walden, was a public admirer of the prime minister and a friend. But when the camera started rolling, the beleaguered leader found herself facing a tenacious interrogator rather than a sympathetic ally. Not for the first time that week, she felt betrayed.A parable about the perils of mixing personal and political life, the interview is the subject of Brian and Maggie, a new two-part Channel 4 drama by the playwright James Graham. Starring Steve Coogan and Harriet Walter in the title roles, it chronicles Walden and Thatcher’s evolving relationship during her premiership before culminating in a partial re-enactment of that exposing 45-minute conversation.As the colloquial title suggests, the show is much less interested in Thatcherism than “Maggie”, the woman. A decade whizzes by in news-clip montages of the miners’ strikes, the poll tax, the Falklands. The focus instead is on quiet evenings at No 10, where the PM and Walden share a whisky, bonding over their rises from humble roots. “You never do shake it off, that feeling of being an outsider,” she confesses.While the series stops short of eliciting affection for Thatcher, it does humanise a divisive figure, partly by showing her own faltering attempts to be more approachable. In one scene, we see her call Walden from bed to stumble her way through a half-remembered joke in an attempt to prove to him (and herself) that she “likes fun”. Later, she wonders whether she has shed too much of her formidable facade.That tension between forging connections and maintaining boundaries also runs through Walden’s story. A former Labour MP, he is forced to set aside the politician’s desire to be liked to become a journalist unafraid to ask uncomfortable questions. But we’re also shown his ability to empathise and understand Thatcher in a way that few in the press could. It’s only later, before the last interview, that we see him consider whether their friendship might have blinded him to her faults. Walter and Coogan go beyond impersonation to draw out deeper, emotional interpretations. But while the interview is faithfully recreated, the rest of the show is a little stilted and overwritten, with too many instances of characters thinking aloud. Its stagy feel leaves you wondering whether it might have been more impactful as a play.Then again, the screen is a fitting medium for a drama partly about the power of TV to transmit truths, stimulate discourse and pierce an Iron Lady’s armour. Thatcher resigned a year after the broadcast. She and Walden never spoke again.★★★☆☆Streaming in full now; episode two airs on Channel 4 on January 30 at 9pm
