Conspiracy and Consensus: Television Drama and the Case of A Very British Coup

Abstract

Ken Loach’s comment during shooting for his film Hidden Agenda ¹ testifies to a vital strand in the popular consciousness, one which wove its way unmistakably into British film and television drama during the 1980s. Well before the allegations of a secret shoot to kill policy in Ulster (the subject of Loach’s film), before the revelations of Spycatcher, before Ponting, Tisdall and Massiter, British screen fictions had begun to reflect unease about the secret machinations of the state. Early forays at the turn of the decade into the Second World War legacy of black propaganda and secret intelligence in David Hare’s Licking Hitler and Ian McEwan’s The Imitation Game, and the underworld of municipal corruption, international crime and IRA terrorism in The Long Good Friday, paved the way for a cluster of films in the mid-1980s, all reflecting apprehension about the covert and increasingly authoritarian nature of centralised power in Britain. 1985 alone saw the release of the feature film Defence of the Realm, the BBC serial The Detective - which dealt with the unofficial growth of a national police force — and (also from the BBC) the television adaptation of Robert McCrum’s novel In the Secret State, a tale of the collusion between government, multi national corporations and private databases in the illicit surveillance of the ordinary citizen. In the same year, perhaps the most fêted television drama of the decade, the BBC serial Edge of Darkness, probed the dark triple alliance between Whitehall, a secretive nuclear industry and the new American entrepreneurial and technological ideology of the ‘high frontier’.

… it’s impossible to be paranoid nowadays because there are so many conspiracies about: and so paranoia has lost its meaning. If you don’t think there is a conspiracy you’re really terribly naive. And after what we’ve learnt about the intelligence services just recently, plainly there are conspiracies going on all over the place.