MacGYVER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (8)
By:
January 25, 2025
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating favorite TV shows from the Eighties (1984–1993). Series edited by Josh Glenn.
A VERY BRITISH COUP | 1988
First airing midway through the dark tunnel of Reagan/Thatcherism, A Very British Coup imagined a light that wasn’t even there at the end, but that we still can move toward.
In 1988 it was thrilling to see the tide turn and sweep pugnacious, populist, peacenik steelworker Harry Perkins into the Prime Minister’s office; set in a future just far off enough to be plausible, and to prepare for, Coup played like a prescient newscast of all the things we knew had to happen.
This was a world short steps ahead of us, where the cowboy capitalists have overplayed their hand, and been put in jail by a banking scandal Perkins made his name in Parliament exposing. With a mandate from the common people he sets about breaking up media monopolies, advancing worker ownership of the companies they toil for, and dismantling the nuclear arsenal that keeps everyone in constant fear.
That is, a mandate from the masses and an economy in shambles from those who just looted it, and active opposition by the rest of the world they still run. Coup becomes a kind of utopian procedural, fascinatingly showing how this struggle might play out while offering zero illusions about how easy or achievable victory might be.
It’s a policy thriller that pivots on the fortitude or flaws of the personalities we see project themselves in the show’s newsfeed-verité style, and reveal the truer doubts and desperations that drive them in more quiet, private moments.
Ray McAnally is magnetic as Perkins, haunted by the bleak hardship of his industrial upbringing and elegantly blustering before the cameras; Alan MacNaughtan is irresistible as Perkins’ icy, icky (and almost identically named) nemesis, Sir Percy, the head of MI5 bent on maintaining an aristocratic order out of a confessed class terror that gives shading to his surface evil.
In Perkins’ plain-spoken, heart-piercing oratory, difficult decisions, and genuine risks we see the way our leaders “should” act; in the British public’s embrace of what’s right rather than easy we see what societal choices “should” be made. This vision sticks with me long past almost every plot point of the show having ceased to be; within five years there’d be no cold-war balance of power, and the liberal “opposition” parties of both the UK and US would be pod-personed into line with the permanent status quo, like the stealth takeover of the series’ title. They turned out the lights, maybe for good, but they can’t make me forget I saw it once.
MacGYVER YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Michael Grasso on MAX HEADROOM | Heather Quinlan on MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 | Mark Kingwell on CHINA BEACH | Judith Zissman on SANTA BARBARA | Adelina Vaca on TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES | Deborah Wassertzug on MOONLIGHTING | Josh Glenn on VOLTRON | Adam McGovern on A VERY BRITISH COUP | Alex Brook Lynn on STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION | Nikhil Singh on CHOCKY | Sara Ryan on REMINGTON STEELE | Vanessa Berry on THE YOUNG ONES | Dan Reines on GET A LIFE | Susannah Breslin on PEE-WEE’S PLAYHOUSE | Marc Weidenbaum on LIQUID TELEVISION | Elina Shatkin on PERFECT STRANGERS | Lynn Peril on THE SIMPSONS | David Smay on THE DAYS AND NIGHTS OF MOLLY DODD | Annie Nocenti on THE SINGING DETECTIVE | Tom Nealon on MIAMI VICE | Anthony Miller on ST. ELSEWHERE | Gordon Dahlquist on BLACKADDER | Peggy Nelson on SEINFELD | Nicholas Rombes on TWIN PEAKS | Ramona Lyons on ÆON FLUX
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