IT WAS a weekend for strong women, or in the case of Married to Maggie: Denis Thatcher’s Story (Channel 4, Sunday), their longsuffering menfolk. As the pre-publicity frequently reminded us, this was the late Prime Ministerial consort’s first, last and only television interview.
As it was conducted by his daughter Carol, however, a Paxman-style mauling was never on the agenda, even if she did ask him: “What did marriage mean to you?” “Good grief, woman!” he exclaimed, slapping his forehead. “In cricket terms you’ve bowled me a googly, haven’t you?” The question didn’t seem that tricky to me, but then I have never been married to Margaret Thatcher. He never did answer, but that was as close as we got to any kind of suggestion that anything had been less than tickety-boo.
Lady Thatcher was equally equivocal when her Carol asked if it had been “a romantic courtship”. “I wouldn’t use that word,” she explained. “We had the same views and therefore it was easy to talk, one to another, about the things that were happening at the time.” I expect there is a term for men who enjoy this sort of foreplay: “GBH-of-the-earole-ophiliacs” perhaps.
In truth we didn’t learn that much new. Denis emerged as more wily, genial, goodhumoured and generous than he was reputed to be, and the former editor of Private Eye, Richard Ingrams, was happy to admit that he was much less of a buffoon than his famous Dear Bill letters suggested. The most telling observation probably came from Bill himself, lifelong friend Bill Deedes, who explained that the letters were extremely helpful because they “made it impossible to present Denis as an eminence grise”.
Bernard Ingham said he could be “endearingly politically incorrect”, which translates roughly as “rancidly prejudiced and reactionary”, but he was clearly a huge support to his wife. And it is hard to dislike a man whose wife calls him “DT” when he has more terms for a drink than the Eskimos have for snow.
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The menfolk in In Search of the Brontës (BBC One, Saturday) by contrast were doomed to misery and thwarted ambition. This was a sensitively dramatised and often very moving biography of brilliantly imaginative women struggling to cope in tragic and straitened circumstances. My only quibble is that Charlotte, who is supposed to be plain, is played by the excellent Victoria Hamilton, who isn’t. Next week brings literary success and lots more tragedy.
How different things might have been if only the poor old Brontës had been born in Manhattan with handbags full of credit cards. They could have lived like the girls in Sex and the City, which returned to Channel 4 on Friday, and written books called Wuthering Cocktails and The Tenant of Wildfell Loft Conversion.
I believe the series gets seriously raunchy later, but there has always been something verging on the wretched about these women, Bridget Joneses with decaff-cappuccinos and designer swaggers. By now it is getting distinctly uncomfortable, as they teeter on the brink of caving in and settling for less than the lifestyle fantasy.
Carrie Bradshaw herself (Sarah Jessica Parker) is getting a touch scrawny around the collarbones, a late-summer rather than a spring chicken, oversleeping in the “city that never sleeps”. Samantha, the vampy sex-goddess, looks like imminent-mutton dressed as recently-ex-lamb. Miranda has realised that she is in love with her homely baby-father, Steve. More worryingly Charlotte is in a relationship with a self-confessed “putz” who looks like a cross between Duncan Goodhew and Gollum from Lord of the Rings. The sassy double-entendre-ridden commentary from Carrie’s newspaper columns seems increasingly out of place.
Even so, it is a shame that it is the last series. They could carry on, with the title adjusted to reflect the changing physical preoccupations of the newly middle-aged: haemorrhoids, for instance, osteoporosis or Cysts in the City.
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There was yet another strong independent woman in Secrets of Magic (BBC One, Saturday) in the form of the glamorous blonde conjuror-ette Simone Bienne. Not that her presence helped much. The problem is the format, which tries to be both an “Aaah! So that’s how they do it!” show — like Penn and Teller — and an “Oo-er! How on earth did they do that?” show — like Paul Daniels. In the process it fell between two trick stools with false bottoms.
All “magic” is problematic, anyway. Since you already know that it is just a trick, the question of how a member of the audience magically reappears in a funny-looking box of the type only ever seen on magic shows becomes academic, if not downright tedious.
The “celebrity” panel (when was the undercover reporter Donal MacIntyre reclassified as a “celebrity”, by the way?) had a stab at guessing the method, which was then demonstrated by the magicians in all its pointlessly intricate glory. Oh really! Gosh. Is that the time?
The twist was that the four magicians then performed the trick again by an entirely different method! But they had just shown us that all these “illusions” are just cunning stunts, so who cares? How Margaret Thatcher managed to find a husband who not only shared her views, but who bowled along cheerfully tolerating her driven, workaholic lifestyle and over-emphatic utterances — now that really was a magic trick, and one that may never be fully explained.