THE REVEREND OF REALPOLITIK
It was Margaret Thatcher’s favourite television series. It won consecutive best comedy series awards at the Baftas in the first three years of its run, from 1980. And so obsessive were its writers, Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, in exposing the secret machinations of British politics, they showed scripts to secret sources gleaned from Harold Wilson’s and James Callaghan’s governments; the sources would sprinkle the fictional plots with verisimilitude-bolstering nuggets of reality.
