There’s an inevitability about ITV adapting the story of the disgraced British Labour MP John Stonehouse into a TV drama.
Those of us who grew up in the 1970s will be familiar with the tale of the MP who faked his own death.
And with ITV cornering the market in bizarre British real life crime tales into miniseries, it comes as no surprise that it has waded into those waters with Scottish director Jon S Baird and journalist turned author John Preston on board.
Preston was responsible for the book that inspired BBC1’s amusing series ‘A Very British Scandal‘ and his three part drama has the same air of skittishness.
© ITVMatthew Macfadyean plays Stonehouse, the MP for Wallsall North who was born in a working class family from Southampton and was regarded as a rising star in Harold Wilson’s Labour Party.
In a clever piece of casting, Macfadyean’s real wife Keeley Hawes plays Stonehouse’s first wife and mother of his three children, Barbara Smith.
At the start of the drama, Stonehouse smugly sits at the dinner table proclaiming to his children how wonderful their family life is.
But pride comes before one hell of a fall.
© ITVThe Stonehouses’ marriage is far from perfect with him indulging a penchant for extra-marital affairs.
A decent orator, he catches the eye of Kevin R McNally’s Prime Minister Harold Wilson and to the delight of Barbara is appointed Transport Minister.
Both believe it is the first significant step on a journey that will eventually lead him to occupying 10 Downing Street.
His first foreign trip as a minister, however, takes him to Czechoslovakia where Ieva Andrejevaite’s interpreter Irena Bala catches his eye.
© ITVThey wind up in bed together but their tryst has been filmed, resulting in Igor Grabuzov’s Czech intelligence officer Alexander Marek blackmailing the British Government minister into becoming a spy.
Stonehouse receives cash for passing on information about the Government, hiding the money initially in a suitcase in his wardrobe and then eventually making deposits in the bank.
Marek thinks he’s a dreadful spy, though, often imparting really dull information.
Even when Stonehouse thinks he has unearthed a real nugget, he discovers his revelation about the Anglo French supersonic trans-Atlantic airplane Concorde is already known because it was announced on French TV two days earlier.
© ITVAssigned Emer Heatley’s secretary Sheila Buckley, Stonehouse gets romantically entangled with her and also makes a series of terrible financial investments with the cash he’s earned.
Aware that the authorities are taking an interest in his financial affairs, his ears prick up when Sheila talks about the lack of coordination in the Births, Marriages and Deaths registry.
Assuming the identity of a constituent Joe Carey whose funeral he recently attended, Stonehouse successfully hoodwinks the authorities into getting a passport in his constituent’s name and heads to Florida to fake his own death in an apparent drowning.
With little regard for his wife and children or his colleagues in government with a wafer thin majority, he heads to Melbourne under his new identity.
© ITVThe plan is for Sheila to join him but with the world also looking for the missing aristocrat suspected of murder Lord Lucan, his appearance in Australia soon attracts the attention of the police.
In the run-up to its broadcast, Preston was upfront about the unwillingness of the disgraced MP’s surviving family to have anything to do with the three part drama.
Neither Barbara Smith not Sheila Buckley were prepared to talk to him while researching and writing the screenplay.
Mr Stonehouse’s daughter Julia did meet him but has subsequently written a scathing article in the Guardian about the programme makers treating her family’s tragic story as light entertainment.
© ITVNoting the programme makers will move on after it is broadcast, leaving her family to pick up the pieces, she disputes the Czech spying claims in the show and its suggestion that her dad was recruited as a result of a honey trap.
Julia Stonehouse also rejects the portrayal of her mother as a “domestic snoop” and takes exception to the depiction of her and her siblings as “weirdly silent children”.
Noting many of the claims in the miniseries have been published before in newspapers and books and have been disputed, she states: “The true narrative, that my father had a lonely mental breakdown, became hard for people to accept.
“In 1976, men’s mental health wasn’t discussed and nobody knew that Mandrax, the prescribed drug my father had been overusing for years, caused depression, anxiety, paranoia, confusion, poor decision making and an increased risk of suicide.
© ITV“It would be banned in the UK and US in 1984 – 10 years too late for my father.”
For his part, Preston has insisted he never wanted to judge or ridicule John Stonehouse when writing the drama.
“I really just wanted to understand how someone could get themselves into this terrible mess,” Hello magazine reported him as saying.
“I wanted to be as sympathetic as possible to everyone involved and so I hope that no-one is treated particularly harshly in it, actually.”
© ITVIf that is the yardstick by which you measure ‘Stonehouse,’ though, then unfortunately Preston has failed.
As amusing as the show undoubtedly is, the tone of the show is definitely skittish and Macfadyean’s depiction of the Labour minister is that of a pompous, deluded buffoon.
John Stonehouse is portrayed as a figure of ridicule who makes a host of terrible decisions and seems oblivious to the consequences.
Preston and Baird’s drama takes the traditional narrative around the MP and does little to challenge it.
© ITVJohn Stonehouse’s claim that he suffered a mental breakdown is referenced but isn’t really examined.
And the tone is so tongue in cheek, you can’t help contrasting his fake suicide to Leonard Rossiter running into the sea during the credits of the BBC1 sitcom ‘The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin’.
Once again, ‘Stonehouse’ demonstrates the risks of dramatists taking extraordinary real life tales and shoehorning them into a TV drama.
It’s a difficult challenge. Get it right and you will get tonnes of praise.
© ITVGet it wrong and you will inevitably find yourself in a potentially messy public spat with those who lived the story depicted onscreen.
Preston and Baird acknowledge the challenge in a disclaimer at the start of their miniseries which says the drama is based on a true story and contains some fictionalised scenes but, as sure as eggs, a drama with this tongue in cheek tone was always going to annoy some real life protagonists.
Having said that, as a piece of drama, ‘Stonehouse’ is a mostly amusing romp and is very similar to Stephen Frears and Russell T Davies’ Jeremy Thorpe drams ‘A Very British Scandal’.
Like that show, Baird revels in the period detail of 1970s pre-Thatcherite Britain.
© ITVHe mines the comic potential and directs it with vim and vigour.
Macfadyean is undoubtedly fun to watch but Hawes arguably steals the show as his shabbily treated wife.
Heatley also has a lot of fun as Sheila Buckley who sports a speech impediment.
However it is her awkward scenes with Macfadyean and Hawes that really crackle with energy – thanks to the subtle facial expressions of the latter.
© ITVKevin R McNally’s impersonation of Harold Wilson is good value, as is Dorothy Atkinson as the Government whip and future Speaker of the House of Commons Betty Boothroyd.
In keeping with the overall tone, Grabuzov plays his role as a Czech intelligence officer purely for laughs.
At the heart of John Stonehouse’s tale, though, is a tragedy.
Like the families of all disgraced politicians, there is a public humiliation and it is hard not to feel some sympathy for Julia Stonehouse when she argues that the resurrection of the story will reopen a lot of pain.
.jpeg "THE DROWNING MAN (STONEHOUSE) 25")
© ITVNo-one would dispute that John Stonehouse was the architect of his own downfall.
However it is the public shaming of his family that is the real tragedy and as entertaining as ‘Stonehouse’ is, this makes it also a strangely uncomfortable watch.
The same was true for ‘The Thief, His Wife and The Canoe‘ – although that ITV drama arguably managed to tread it’s fine line between comedy and tragedy more successfully.
In her Guardian article, Nicholson suggests the spying allegations against her father should be addressed once and for all in a mock televised trial.
© ITV“The accusers could be witnesses for the prosecution and present their evidence, which an independent panel of academics and lawyers could examine,” she proposes.
“There could be an actual judge and jury. I’m confident that my father would be found innocent because there’s no proof he was an agent, let alone a spy.
“In 1968, my father was appointed to the Privy Council because of his services to British exports. He was no hapless fool.
“Bring on the trial, I say. Give the man a chance to clear his name.”
A gauntlet has been thrown down.
It’ll be fascinating to see if any broadcaster is willing to pick it up and take Julia Stonehouse up on her idea.
(‘Stonehouse’ was broadcast on ITV between January 2-4, 2022)