It certainly needed that sub-title 'How Maggie Might Have Done It' - freeing the producers to serve up a pick-'n-mix docu-drama that does at least hold the attention happily enough for an hour and a half.
Much is made of the tortured relationship between Margaret Thatcher and Edward Heath, the Conservatives' young-man-to-watch in 1949 when the story starts. But it is stretching credulity too far when Heath tries to fight-down his romantic feelings for the flirty Margaret (which she wasn't, when young) and ends up using his influence to get her a winnable seat in Finchley, just to spite her predecessor, a crusty old-style Tory prejudiced against candidates with working-class backgrounds - like Heath!
But it is prejudice against women candidates that bulks-up bigger in the story, accentuated further by the voters' apparent need to trust a candidate with a good war behind him. (Just count the medals on show at those constituency meetings.) There is a poignant scene where Margaret suddenly collapses in tears at yet another rejection. All her life, she had been assured that talent and hard work would take you wherever you wanted, and now she learns that it's not that simple. At these moments, we see how much she needs the apparently redundant Denis as a shoulder to lean on - realistically played by Rory Kinnear, even though the famous lordly voice is replaced by something closer to John Major's classless delivery. Clearly the producers discouraged the temptation to impersonate rather than act. Samuel West's Heath conveys all of the man's social awkwardness, but stops short of replicating the curious hybrid accent that always seemed to reveal a man uncomfortable in his skin.
Andrea Riseborough, as Margaret, sometimes verges on caricature (those mannerisms!), but the sheer gusto of her performance heightens her credibility in the role, as she shares with us both her soaring ambition and her vulnerability and private self-doubt. And don't miss scene-stealer Georgie Glen as the minor official at the Finchley conservative group, slowly warming towards Margaret, and giving vital encouragement when she seemed to be losing.
As the story ends long before she achieves ministerial office, we have to sit through a whole lot of amateurish nudge-nudge referencing of future events in her career - her demands for a better deal from the EU, the school milk controversy, son Mark's misadventures in Africa, even a suggestion of 'Anyone for Denis?' as he marches proudly into the maternity ward, declaring "We're going to win the Ashes back!"
Also the production values are a bit uneven. Too many lines are simply lost through poor acoustics, especially in the restaurant scene when she is apparently prompting Denis to propose to her. The dialogue is unlikely enough anyway, but the crucial question and answer are literally impossible to catch.
