Press

Telegraph
24 January 2007
by Maureen Paton
Source

Prezza: the latest target for satire

A new 90-minute television drama gleefully rekindles the hilarity that greeted news of the Deputy Prime Minister’s affair with his diary secretary. Maureen Paton visits the set

I arrive just as a priapic John Prescott is ravishing his black-stockinged diary secretary Tracey Temple on the Dorneywood hall stairs with his capacious trousers round his ankles, unable to contain himself in time to reach one of the nine bedrooms in the Deputy Prime Minister’s grace-and-favour Buckinghamshire country retreat.

The set is a closed one for all but the director and essential cameramen, but the rest of the crew are gleefully watching the knee-trembler on a monitor before sweeping the autumn leaves from the croquet lawn for an action replay of the moment last summer when a paparazzo’s long lens caught an off-guard Prescott leaning on a mallet while he was supposed to be running the country.

“We have given Prescott two mallets to match his two houses, two ‘wives’ and two Jags,” explains the pony-tailed director Andy Wilson, a veteran of Gormenghast and Spooks, who shoots in the lingering style of his favourite erotic surrealist Luis Buñuel with a nod to the cinéma vérité of The Office as well.

We are on location in Hertfordshire at an 18th-century stand-in for Dorneywood, and the real John Prescott should look to his dignity as this dramatised version of his two-year affair looks set to add greatly to the gaiety of the nation.

Tracey Temple’s published diaries, an unintentionally hilarious mixture of Bridget Jones’s Diary, Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters, Adrian Mole and Diary of a Nobody, has inspired a worm’s-eye view of the world of Westminster from the perspective of this political ingénue in the new 90-minute ITV1 drama Confessions of a Diary Secretary, or “Prezzagate/Traceygate”, as it is known to the crew.

For, in drama’s continuing fightback against the competition from reality television, it is now plundering ideas from the real world of politics with a vengeance.

And it has to be said that this resurgence of heavyweight political satire on television has gained more inspiration from Tony Blair’s Labour administration than from any other government in history, with a triumvirate of such single dramas all made by the same executive producers: David Aukin, Mentorn’s head of drama, and Hal Vogel, who just happens to be the stepson of Home Secretary John Reid.

Aukin and Vogel’s first such project was A Very Social Secretary, the award-winning Channel 4 satire about David Blunkett’s affair with former Spectator managing editor Kimberly Quinn that produced a child and helped to end his ministerial career.

It was authored by former Not the Nine O’Clock News writer and award-winning stage satirist Alastair Beaton, who also wrote Aukin/Vogel’s second political satire The Trial of Tony Blair, shown earlier this week.

The Aukin/Vogel trio is completed by Confessions of a Diary Secretary, the joker in the pack, which follows the fortunes of Tracey Temple from June 2001, when her eyes met Prescott’s across a photocopier, to July 2006 – and the aftermath of her exposure of her affair with her boss.

“I think of it like Upstairs Downstairs: statesmen as perceived by the people who work for them. Bizarrely, I don’t think that this country’s tradition of making fun of our politicians lessens their status in the eyes of the electorate; it couldn’t be much lower. You can hardly say that Confessions will bring down the government: they’ve done it for us,” says Aukin, laughing.

And the writer of Confessions believes that what he labels New Labour “hypocrisy” makes the Blair government a uniquely deserving target of satire.

“Labour were so anti-sleaze in the beginning that they made out they were going to be whiter than white. But they have made exactly the same mistakes that the Tories were making in the mid-’90s with the David Mellors and so on,” points out Tony Basgallop, a professedly non-political animal best-known for the glossy and gossipy BBC1 drama series Hotel Babylon.

“They said they were going to be different - and they’re not. Prescott is a man led by his willy - and he’s not alone.”

With a voiceover from Tracey providing a naive commentary on everything from a lunchtime squabble between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to her strenuous sex sessions with Prescott on the office desk, the drama stretches the real-life chronology to make Prescott’s Zelig-like ex-mistress a witness to other key moments of the Prezza years, such as the punch the former boxer landed on the jaw of an egg-thrower.

Actress Maxine Peake, the 32-year-old rising star who made her name in Victoria Wood’s dinnerladies and as Veronica in Channel 4’s Shameless, is playing Tracey with blonde highlights and rather better legs than the real thing.

All of which bodes well for Confessions’ re-enactment of the infamous Whitehall Christmas party scene of 2002, in which Prescott was photographed sweeping a leg-waving Tracey off her feet (their affair began the next day).

Surprisingly, Peake claims she initially found playing Tracey more difficult than portraying Myra Hindley in last year’s ITV1 drama See No Evil, and not simply because the Moors Murderess was dead by then.

“There was a lot more research to glean from Hindley, whereas it was hard to get a handle on Tracey at first because I didn’t know much about her. She didn’t want to meet me, but that’s understandable.

It’s amazing how someone like Tracey can cause more political damage than a million members of the public marching down the Strand. I think she’s a bit of a thrill-seeker.”

Meanwhile, 56-year-old John Henshaw, a former dustman best-known for his television work in Cops, Early Doors and Born and Bred, has been cast as 68-year-old man-of-the-people Prescott because of his remarkable resemblance to the swaggering former merchant seaman who came up the hard way.

“These are the first sex scenes I’ve ever done. I don’t get many romantic leads,” admits the 18-stone Henshaw. “Prescott has a macho appeal to lots of people. He could have been the next James Bond.”

Says Basgallop: “We wanted the feel of the old Confessions of a Window Cleaner films, very racy but also curiously innocent. My approach was: how do we just make this fun, and how do we get away with showing this much sex on screen?”

# ‘Confessions of a Diary Secretary’ will be shown on ITV1 on Feb 28.