★★★★☆
Because there is so much TV these days, story-hungry producers and writers have been mining real-life events with the fervour and intensity of a very thirsty California gold prospector. The latest true story that played out as drama was the pinch-us-because-we-can’t-quite-believe-it saga of John Stonehouse, the libidinous and self-regarding MP played by Matthew Macfadyen this week. Not unlike the very real “Canoe Man”, John Darwin (subject of another ITV series last year), Stonehouse left his old self on a beach for a new life and identity before everything unravelled.
Giving us the bare facts of a story we have just seen dramatised may seem a risky undertaking, given that it potentially highlights the slight differences in the way the actual people looked and sounded, as well as the tiny changes the writer, John Preston, made “for dramatic purposes”. The purpose of factual films such as this, one suspects, is to appease the legal departments of the broadcasters and Ofcom, because they offer potentially aggrieved relatives or pesky historians a right of reply. Netflix take note.
Yet what was striking about ITV’s The Real Stonehouse (made by a different production company to the drama) was how few dramatic elisions Preston had to fashion. However the facts are packaged, they remain gobsmacking and far from bare, except where our man’s sex life was concerned.
The way, for example, hard-bitten Aussie detectives thought they had nabbed Lord Lucan (who had disappeared in the same month as Stonehouse), and that he was inspired by The Day of the Jackal when stealing the identity of a dead constituent. That the Czech defector who exposed alleged assets such as Stonehouse was called Josef Frolik was almost too perfect, given Stonehouse’s weakness for the opposite sex.
The documentary highlighted how cleverly Preston marshalled material to humanise his hero. Played by Macfadyen, Stonehouse had a genial laugh, which we never really saw in the documentary. The fictionalised version was warmer, more amiably buffoonish; though, to be fair, the real Stonehouse’s filmed appearances were generally confined to him answering hard and difficult questions, either outside courtrooms or in TV studios.
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Macfadyen’s Stonehouse had the right wild hair and was almost certainly a narcissist, but this film couldn’t help but shine a much harsher spotlight on the awfulness of his actions, abandoning his family and blaming everyone and everything but himself.
Another bombshell detail this showed us that was missing from the drama was the claim that he may have “hurt” his put-upon spouse, Barbara (played by Keeley Hawes), when he was angry. And it was in details such as these where the human being Preston and Macfadyen so artfully constructed fell away under a sharper gaze.
● How accurate is ITV’s Stonehouse?
Our sense of his sheer crookedness hung like a bad smell, particularly when Stonehouse’s great-nephew and biographer Julian Hayes gave his evidence. He had little doubt that Stonehouse spied for the Czechs, something Stonehouse’s daughter Julia (notably absent from this film) vehemently denies.
Stonehouse came across as venal, outlandish and self-seeking, which made it harder to buy his claim that he acted this way because he had a breakdown, although the story still doesn’t feel any less compelling. In the end, the real Stonehouse collapsed on the set of a TV discussion show and died three weeks later (in the drama he died in the make-up chair). He may have wasted his life. But he certainly knew how to make a drama out of it.
