Last week, No 10 issued a statement regarding what it considered to be “very concerning” reports of MPs indulging in sex and excessive alcohol while on parliamentary trips abroad. (Perhaps the suitcase full of wine served a purpose beyond Downing Street?) With fortuitous timing, Stonehouse (ITV 1) is here with the vintage edition. This fun and funny drama, high-spirited and revelling in its absurdities, retells the story of John Stonehouse, Labour MP for Walsall North, a former postmaster general and rising star of Harold Wilson’s government, who got himself in a spot of financial and espionage-based bother. His solution was to fake his own death on a beach in Miami in 1974, before fleeing to Australia with his secretary and assuming a new, stolen identity.
The problem for him, and the joy for viewers, is that Stonehouse is not very good at being a baddie. Matthew Macfadyen plays him as a heedless buffoon from the start. In the Commons, he parrots what Wilson says; at home, he parrots what his wife, Barbara (played by Macfadyen’s real-life wife, Keeley Hawes), says. He is a man in search of an identity, and on a work trip to Czechoslovakia (as it was then), he makes much use of the “traditional Czech specialities” on offer by getting extremely drunk and having sex with his guide and translator – an act which is, naturally, filmed by the Czech secret service and used to blackmail him into spying for them.
