Here’s Ian’s review. Next time, I’ll try and be quicker off the mark so people don’t double-up inadvertently …

THE TRIAL OF TONY BLAIR
Thursday 18/01/07, Channel 4
reviewed by Ian Jones

Who’d have thought Michael Murray would end up running the country?

For that is pretty much what was on offer here: the combustive, twitching, dystopian hero of GBH reborn as Prime Minister of the nation, packing just as much fury and folly as when he was first brought low all those years ago in an unnamed northern city by a gaggle of political capers.

For anyone at all familiar with Alan Bleasdale’s seismically significant Channel 4 drama, it was nigh on impossible to not believe Robert Lindsay was, unconsciously or otherwise, distilling the potent essences of his earlier creation into his depiction of Tony Blair. In fact, the similarities were almost too obvious to be believed.

The sudden switching between moods of blistering wit and blustering self-pity; the waves of unimpeachable arrogance subsiding, literally in a second, into whimpers of overwhelming guilt; above all the armoury of tics and affectations and bizarre gestures growing ever more preposterous in the face of mounting crisis – they were all here, and all served to load this wholly unrelated, story with incorrigible baggage.

Which, as it turned out, was no bad thing. There was precious little else by way of substance residing within either the script or direction of The Trial of Tony Blair. Subtract Lindsay and his legacy from the proceedings and you would have been faced with slim pickings indeed.

No other big names populated the cast; none of the dozens of small names delivered anything approaching a memorable performance. The writing veered between essays into lumpen symbolism (look, there’s Tony repeatedly washing his hands in a basin!) and seminars from the Clive Dunn academy of farce (oh no, Tony’s fallen out of bed – again!).

The direction, to an extent beholden to such an imbalanced narrative, see-sawed between episodes of subtle sentimentality and crude operatics. The viewer, faced with all of this, just about struggled to keep up with Lindsay’s seemingly infinite catalogue of contorted facial expressions.

The points the writer Alistair Beaton appeared to be making about the life and work of Tony Blair were many in number and all contradictory. This wouldn’t have been an issue were the points in and of themselves sufficiently persuasive or robust; instead Beaton’s scattergun tactics amounted to an assault high on quantity but low in quality.

There simply wasn’t the time or space for the viewer to find a coherent way to respond to all the pot shots. Not that there might have been much within Beaton’s script that passed for coherence; perhaps wisely for his sake the pace didn’t let up long enough for the audience to really find out.

There was also a nagging feeling here that everyone involved in the production was treating its premise as justification enough. In other words, that the mere notion of doing a drama called The Trial of Tony Blair would somehow see them through 90 minutes of airtime. After all, with as incendiary a title as that, an audience would be bound to want to see how it ends – wouldn’t they?

Well, the fact we didn’t actually get to see any of the titular prosecution can’t have left many thinking it was worth sticking with all the way through. In this sense the title was a complete bluff, somewhat akin to making a drama called The Assassination Of JFK then failing to include anything about Kennedy’s shooting. A hypothetical staging of Blair being cross-examined in a war crimes tribunal would’ve made for far more absorbing viewing, besides offering the chance for a bit more sustained and lucid polemic.

The absence of any trace of the eponymous trial was the last, and greatest, miscalculation. It left you feeling desperately short-changed, even duped. At a push you could have been so inclined to tolerate all the cheap gags and pratfalls and poor impersonations of Gordon Brown and David Cameron and bludgeoning metaphors (oops, there goes another war child running through Tony’s kitchen) for the chance of a glimpse of Blair in the dock. Then again, such an eventuality would have needed a production team of another level of aspiration altogether.

Instead we were left with the sight of Michael Murray being escorted into the back of a prison van to the strains of “All These Things That I’ve Done” by The Killers (one of David Cameron’s Desert Island Discs), still wondering why he couldn’t ever be a good man. And thanks to this simplistic, clunking piece of television, we, the viewers, still had no idea either.

Here is another true story. Alistair Beaton’s The Trial of Tony Blair is one of the most dizzyingly brilliant TV dramas of the last decade. Not just a story – it’s fact. This was superb, as clinical and precise as Arthur Schnabel playing Beethoven or Phil Taylor throwing darts.

The tasty storylines that made up Beaton’s work were purely imaginary. It’s 2010 and Hillary Clinton’s in the Oval Office; Gordon Brown’s in No 10, and wins a hairsbreadth majority over a hastily-sketched, Footlights-revue caricature of David Cameron (too much bikes, hip hop etc). Circumstances conspire, with the slow-march rat-tat-tat of a military funeral, to send Tony to The Hague and judgement (Blair’s conversion to Catholicism plays a heavy role throughout). Brown (Peter Mullan, brilliant voicing but in terms of looks might as well be Janet rather than Gordon Brown) is maneouvred into sending Blair (Robert Lindsay) for trail concerning war crimes in Iraq. Actually, no trial proceedings are shown, merely the prisoner Blair’s flight leaving Heathrow for The Hague, after which credits roll.

Improbable? No less so than the deranged cats-cradle of narratives polluting the now ex-PM’s head, a helter-skelter of the spin-doctor platitudes, moral delusion and cant that, in the end, tragically make up the man himself, something unforgivingly exposed by Beaton. “I think you’re beginning to lose touch with reality.” Blair tells his wife (played with just a little too much sympathy by the glacially efficient Phoebe Nicholls). From which point on one knows Blair will self-destruct, and he duly does, in royally entertaining fashion.

From the get-go, Robert Lindsay’s Blair (Lindsay is still visibly Wolfie Smith, but at least he has the voice and the tics, including the shiver-inducing psychotic’s trick of smiles in all the wrong places and the suggestion of what may be bipolarity in our great teacher) is a man quite clearly bonkers even before reality surges in so lethally on mind and body. Like all self-regarding students who never grew up, Blair wanted to play Hamlet. Lindsay knows it. He plays Blair as the guitar-shop axeman dreaming of being Hendrix or Blackmore but doomed to be umpteenth-best; a sad and lonely comedown instead of a truly tragic one, the vision and the legacy gone, a nuance Beaton captures beautifully.

But Beaton doesn’t even give Blair the dignity of a Lear as his downfall inexorably unfolds. Mad, wronged Lear raged against the dying of the light on his hind legs; Blair isn’t even this, he’s made to skulk. There’s much gorgeously-sketched bullshit spoken about “the legacy” of which Blair’s paid yea-sayers and toadies can barely conceal their contempt. Yes, there’s stuff about God. Lots of it. In a scene worth viewing 50 years from now, Blair’s publisher tentatively says there’s too much about God, and he promptly `nixes his multimillion pound memoir advance with a mind-bogglingly bizarre tirade against atheists and liberals. There are rather-well-handled dream sequences of dead Iraqi kids and shot-up squaddies; the soundtrack makes ironic reference back to the Britpop of ’97′s Cool Britannia.

There are also undertones of leitmotifs yet to come – Gordon Brown’s baritone paranoia is a subtext for a new TV drama that you know is just waiting to happen when he gets No 10′s keys. The sequence where Blair is genetically fingerprinted upon his arrest prior to extradition is maybe one of the most excruciatingly ironic pieces of TV drama this writer has ever seen. Yeah, Mike Leigh included, since you ask.

Little, if anything is overdone or bludgeoned home. This grown-up, civilised drama doesn’t shout, save for the broadbrushed silliness when TB almost runs over a comedy Arab in his 4×4. The Messianic bent in Blair is maybe slightly overstretched – although when Lindsay says, “Britain? I’ve done Britain” it sounds spine-chillingly authentic. There is also a moment when Blair Learishly castigates the incompetents that surround him. This seems a little too close to Hitler’s table talk for comfort. Blair is not Hitler, but he increasingly resembles Herbert Lom’s tragi-comic portrayal of Dreyfus, the boss of the surété that Inspector Clouseau drives beyond reason.

Yes, there are loose ends – that Blair would end up in a cell is implausible (as Cherie tells him, with cruel irony, he can afford good lawyers). And yes, Nicholls’s Cherie and Mullan’s Brown are awkward. Because both are seen to inhabit a world of reason and Cherie’s friendship with Carole Caplin among others suggests that this is maybe wishful thinking. This, however, means Blair’s folly is so much more starkly repointed. Anyone who listens to any Blair speech cannot fail to doubt that now.

TV rarely does drama like this. Nothing of The Trial of Tony Blair, or very little, in terms of script or visual language, is reduced to soap opera convention, yet is nonetheless compelling. This is a feat in itself, and given its visual satisfactions, the drama sets 2007 a serious challenge for a better slice of TV. True story – truer than WMD, anyway.

Yes, true. No word of a lie. Remember that, Tony? Hello, Tony? Tony?