I only got to see Boudiccea, I mean Boudicca, during the ad breaks of The Deal last night, but what I saw suggested that I may have made the right choice. Chelmsford 123 is not so far in the past that some of us don’t remember its piss poor attempts at anachronistic humour. Seeing the boy god emperor Nero stropping like the menko teenage he was, well that was par for the course. But seeing Alex Kingston gamely trying to act while everyone around her was playing dress up was a little bit sad. Seeing all the boys in their plastic breastplate waggling around swords and being all puffy and Roman – that was just a laughfest.
Equally as anachronistic, though only set in the last fifteen years, was the aforementioned The Deal. Its amazing how distracting the wrong kind of bus can be, let along buildings which just would not be there (some people have mentioned the Gherkin in the skyline, I would like to state that there has never, ever, been a burger van on Waterloo Bridge). It whizzed through the formation of New Labour, the on and off friendship of Tony Blair and felt like A Woman Of Substance, except being about Labour politicians it came out like Some Bloke Of Not Much Substance. A mini-series would have been better – director Stephen Frears has already mentioned doing a sequel (one assumes about the election itself). Notable mainly for the way the three leads (Smith, Blair and Brown) inhabited their parts, it is odd seeing something historical which is still part of the actual news.
A better idea would be to take this cast and perhaps dramatise the political events of the month. Possibly a dastardly thing to do, and marvelously undemocratic but it would be a ratings winner. If Sky can do a reconstruction of the Hutton Enquiry on a nightly basis for a month, this surely would not be outside the bounds of topical drama. A real life soap, rekindling interest in politics. A dramatised reality TV show. As (fictional)Blair says to (fictional)Brown in Granita, that soap star there, she’s got real power.