A night of TV documentaries

As is customary on the big occasion, the mainstream broadcasters reverted to type. The BBC produced something formal, conventional; Channel 4 produced something slightly offbeat, filled with amusing and colourful anecdote; and ITV stuck with its ratings-friendly detective serial, only slipping its tribute documentary on once most of its viewers were safely in bed.

On a night of documentaries about the late Baroness Thatcher, Channel 4 went first, at 8.00pm, with Maggie and Me, presented by Jon Snow, a man described by Denis Thatcher as “that pinko”. As it turned out, the pinko did her proud, giving little personal insights that most of the more straightforward rehashings of her story will miss.

A photographer recalled how she’d addressed him as “You little socialist”. He asked what made her think he was socialist. “You’re Scottish,” she replied, “you must be.” But she was, in her inimitable way, only teasing, and served him whisky.

“I could sense that underneath she was just as scared as anyone else,” said Matthew Parris, a young Tory MP in the early Eighties, later a parliamentary sketch writer and political columnist. But he acknowledged that if she was scared, she was pretty good at hiding it. He recalled the day when, campaigning in London, she’d forcibly seized control of a street-cleaning machine from its startled operator, and manoeuvred it with the same manic efficiency as if she were vacuuming the hall carpet, barking, “Women can get into corners that men can never reach!”

By the time you were told of the time she’d tussled with the Queen at Balmoral over which of them was going to do the washing-up, you were ready to believe anything about her.

As a reporter during her premiership – or rather, let’s face it, reign – Snow had always tried to ask her awkward questions (hence “pinko”). But he was gracious about his record of success. “After 20 interviews,” he confessed, “20-nil to Margaret Thatcher.”

Broadcasters record this sort of obituary well in advance, a fact immediately obvious in the case of Margaret Thatcher: Prime Minister at 8.30pm on BBC One. First, it was narrated by Andrew Marr, who suffered a stroke in January and is currently off work. The talking heads included Ken Clarke and Lord Patten, both looking unmistakably younger than they do now. Clarke looked so much younger you wondered for a moment if his interview had been recorded while she was still Prime Minister.

Unlike Channel 4’s bran tub of anecdotes, this was a biography, sober and chronological. Nothing wrong with that, although if you’d been watching the rolling news channels all afternoon, you felt as though you knew it all by heart and could if pushed mime along with the narration. Still, there was a nice vignette from Lord Powell, her foreign policy adviser. Ronald Reagan loved her, said Lord Powell, but if the President “thought she was going on a bit” his eye was seen to “stray to the clock on the wall in the hope that lunch wasn’t too far away…”

By the time ITV’s contribution, Margaret Thatcher: The Woman Who Changed Britain, came on at 10.35pm, you wondered what would be left for them to say. Perhaps it was just biography fatigue setting in, but I felt as if I was watching reheated leftovers. Ken Livingstone, Shirley Williams, Michael Portillo, Ken Clarke, Neil Kinnock: I’d now heard these same faces’ recollections so many times over the past 10 hours that my mind was starting to stew.