One can hardly call the past few years salad days for the fourth estate. Apart from a dwindling share of eyeballs due to an increasing number of media options, the press has come for its share of much-deserved criticism for corruption and bias.

Into that dynamic steps Brian and Maggie, a docudrama that aired on Britain’s ITV earlier this year and that PBS imported to the United States. In dramatizing the last television interview Margaret Thatcher gave as Britain’s prime minister, the show provides historical precedents for our era by dissecting relations between the press and politicians in another country and time.

Notable Cabinet Departure

The interview depicted in the drama, between Thatcher and broadcaster Brian Walden, came three days after Thatcher’s chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, had resigned. The departure of her chief economic minister of over six years brought to the fore questions about politics and policy. On policy, Lawson and Thatcher had fought a semi-public conflict for years over exchange rates. Lawson arranged for the British pound to “shadow” the German deutschmark as a way to fight inflation, but Thatcher feared (rightly, as events proved) that such a move would only increase inflation.

Coming more than a decade into her premiership, Lawson’s resignation also raised the issue of Thatcher’s personality. While she had turned her Soviet nickname of the “Iron Lady” — originally intended as an insult — into a strength, 10 years in power had earned Thatcher no small number of critics within her parliamentary party. Into that dynamic stepped Brian Walden, whose interview, arranged months in advance, happened to coincide with Lawson’s resignation.

A Sympathetic Interviewer?

Thatcher called Walden her favorite interviewer, a somewhat surprising compliment given his roots. Walden had spent more than a dozen years in Parliament as a Labour MP, from 1964 to 1977, before resigning his seat to become a broadcaster and political commentator. But, when Britain’s Labour Party became infiltrated by radical Trotskyites, Walden opposed the “hard left,” giving him something in common with Thatcher’s Conservatism.

Brian and Maggie covers a lot of ground — arguably too much. It weaves in the history of Thatcher’s premiership, how Thatcher and Walden rose from working-class roots at a time when British politics was largely reserved for wealthy elites, and the media landscape in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s. 

But at its core, the production focuses on Walden’s interrogation of Thatcher at a time when the premier was wounded and vulnerable. Walden was favorably inclined toward Thatcher and wrote one of her speeches during her 1983 reelection campaign, a major ethical breach for a journalist. Could he and would he scrutinize — some would call it attack — what he viewed as a sympathetic figure?

Tough But Fair 

The dramatized interview serving as the focal point of Brian and Maggie comes in the production’s second episode. A teaser clip quoted the fictionalized Thatcher calling it a “betrayal.” The actual interview is available online; it looks little like most American interviews, coming in at 45 minutes long, with its first segment taking half an hour.

In the actual interview, Thatcher comes across as defensive, repeating the talking points that she didn’t want her chancellor to go and that his position was “unassailable.” But when Walden asked an obvious question — if her economic adviser was causing friction between herself and the chancellor, couldn’t she have just fired her adviser to keep her chancellor? — Thatcher stammered and stumbled, saying “I don’t know” five separate times. 

It turns out Thatcher did know the answer. She later wrote in her 1993 memoir that Lawson, the chancellor, had come to her with an ultimatum — either her adviser goes, or he would go — meaning she could have kept her chancellor by cashiering her adviser. She didn’t want to admit that publicly at the time, but she did a poor job dissembling in front of the cameras.

Overall, the actual interview comes across as a political ally pleading for Thatcher to concede some faults and change her managerial style. Walden badgered Thatcher slightly, but not to the extent of Jeremy Paxman’s infamous 1997 interview with Michael Howard. Regardless, changing course was not in Thatcher’s nature. “You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning,” she once proclaimed at a party conference.

One year after her interview with Walden, those festering disagreements on style and substance prompted Conservative Party MPs to commit regicide, removing Thatcher as party leader (and thus prime minister) in the fall of 1990.

Changing Face of Media

As the book serving as the basis of Brian and Maggie notes, the political interview has changed much on both sides of the Atlantic since October 1989. Politicians frequently evade questions, both literally and figuratively. The docudrama opens with footage of Boris Johnson disappearing into a meat locker to escape an interview. And the fractured media landscape gives them more opportunities to do so. Why go through a difficult set-piece interview on a Sunday talk show when appearing on a friendly podcast will attract more attention?

But Brian and Maggie demonstrates how a good interviewer can still reveal much about a subject that the subject does not necessarily want to reveal. (Thatcher was reportedly so infuriated by the interview that she never spoke to Walden again.) In short, the drama shows the value of good journalists who actually seek the truth — and find it.

The conclusion of Brian and Maggie airs Sunday, Oct. 12, on most PBS stations and is available on the PBS app.