The Politician's Husband

 


 From 4th - 10th May, BBC ONE

David Tennant fans will be delighted to hear that he's back on our screens again in The Politician's Husband from 4th - 10th May on BBC ONE.

Written by Paula Milne and directed by Simon Cellan-Jones, The Politician's Husband is a companion piece to the multi-award-winning The Politician's Wife.

Writer Paula Milne explains why she decided to write it



"When The Politician’s Wife came out in 1995, many people asked me if I would write a sequel. But I never wanted to. My instinct was that it was best to leave a good piece of work alone.

"As the years passed, however, I found myself starting to think about it again. The whole premise of The Politician’s Wife was to use marriage as a kind of prism through which to look at contemporary political life. At the time there was a lot of talk about family values; John Major had launched the Back to Basics campaign the year before, and so on. I began to think that if that template had worked then, perhaps a similar one could work now. But this time I wanted to reverse it, so that it would be about power within a marriage. I wanted to explore the way that men feel about their wives becoming more successful than them – that’s an interesting dynamic to set against the power games in Whitehall.

"To some extent there are autobiographical elements to the story. I have been married twice myself, and sadly both times they ended in divorce. It’s impossible to say whether my own success played a part in the breakdowns. That’s a very difficult thing for a man to admit. But without wanting to sound overly paranoid, I think it did. I don’t think it was the only thing, but I think it was the most constant thing. And that in itself is quite interesting; how men feel that disempowerment. That’s certainly something we see in Aiden, the main character in The Politician’s Husband.



"At the very start of the drama, Aiden is attempting to run for the leadership, with his wife’s support. So, initially, Freya seems like the dutiful wife who is stepping back to allow her talented husband to take the crown. The resentment she feels only becomes clear as the story unfolds. There’s a scene in episode one where she walks into the Cabinet Room. I wrote in the stage directions: “She puts her hands on the table and feels, for the first time, the thermals of power...” And I think that scene puts the audience in advance of Aiden. Because then they know something he doesn’t: that, suddenly, she feels it. She wants it. She gets sucked into that vortex of wanting power.

"Even in the first sex scene, you can see that there’s a kind of gamesmanship between Aiden and Freya. It’s mischievous, but it’s also combative. The director and I talked a lot about that, because we felt that what happens later between them shouldn’t come out of nowhere. As viewers, you should feel that there has always been an element of competition buried underneath this marriage. I don’t want to give too much away, but just as the sexual journey of the characters in The Politician’s Wife reflected the deterioration in their relationship – anger, disappointment and revenge – a similar device is used in this series. And, yes, it is quite shocking in places.



"From the beginning, I was very keen that the drama shouldn’t be associated with any real-life political party – because then it would just have become about the Tories, or the Labour Party, or the Coalition. I think there’s something in the bear pit of the Commons that causes all politicians to behave in rather similar ways, whatever side of the divide they’re on. On the whole, I think they go into it to do good, but somehow that gets diffused. The combative, competitive, party-line aspect of politics seems to suck out their ideology. The system seems to brutalise them. Towing the party line, subduing their own doubts for the sake of the Party, perhaps seeing their constituents suffer because of it... it’s all about the quest for power. To get power. To stay in power. Aiden says at one point, “Sometimes you have to do bad things to get into power in order to do good things when you’re there.” The problem is, if you do bad things long enough you may forget how to do good things!

"I wouldn’t say The Politician’s Husband is a totally damning portrait of politics. That’s certainly not why I started to write it. But I did want to mirror how many people feel about the current political climate. And I think in this country there is a deep-rooted cynicism about the political system. Writing the drama was an opportunity to refract those feelings of disappointment, I suppose, and to bed it into a story. Everything is of its time and I just felt this was a good time, particularly after the expenses scandal. At one point Aiden uses the expression, “If you lie down with dogs, you get fleas...” So it was really about depicting that, and also seeing how it affected Freya.

"In any case, for me, writing about politics on its own could feel a bit dry. The previous generation of dramatists who wrote about political themes were inevitably blokes. And they wrote wonderful stuff – people like Jim Allen and Trevor Griffiths and so on. As a woman, though, I think I write about politics in a different way. For instance, I once wrote a BBC drama called Die Kinder (1990); it was a story about marital kidnap, but in the end it turned into an examination of Bader Meinhof and terrorism. So you can use the emotional engine of a marriage to drive the narrative. You have to engage the audience with the heart as well as the mind.

"I think it’s possible some MPs were a bit wary of talking to me after The Politician’s Wife; when I wrote that, I was a rather unknown factor! So I didn’t speak to a great deal of MPs during research. This time round I spent more time with special advisers. I also read an awful lot of books. I wanted to get the statistical background of it, if you like. To cross-refer between all the shades of political ideologies. To make sure that things would hold up. Understanding the mechanics of politics is to some extent even more important than talking to individual politicians – because often they can’t put their heads above the bunker to see the overview. I found the same thing when I was researching a medical drama called The Fragile Heart (1996). I talked to heart surgeons and brain surgeons but they couldn’t give me the overview. They couldn’t be the Deep Throat of the health service because they were so preoccupied with their own bunker. Talking to people who were once political researchers, or people who are no longer in power, is more interesting because they have that slight sense of distance.

"One of the most important characters in the drama is Freya and Aiden’s son Noah, who has Asperger’s. He has a particular obsession with flight paths. He also doesn’t like to be touched. And you quickly see that Aiden, particularly, doesn’t know how to handle him. Even Freya admits at one point that she goes to work to get away from Noah’s endless obsessions and rituals. Neither of them wants to admit, or even believe, that they don’t love him enough. Dramatically, I think that was important. It makes them a bit bruised by life. They aren’t just the ideal family in an ivory tower. They are a family who have to deal with something – at the same time as trying to do their jobs and have political aspirations. So Noah’s place in the story was to make them seem oddly ordinary, in a way.

"I did quite a bit of research into Asperger’s before writing the drama. In fact I already knew quite a bit about it from writing something that didn’t come to fruition. My nephew has it, too, so I knew something about it firsthand. One of the interesting things about Asperger’s is that it doesn’t mask the personality as autism does. So when you’re sitting round a table with those with the condition, you see that one would be obsessed with lifts all over the world and how they worked, another was obsessed with cartoon characters, another with the history of fountain pens – but they all manifest it in different ways. I found that very interesting.

"I think David and Emily are brilliant in the main roles. The most fantastic thing about them is that you would completely believe they are married. When people say that actors have great chemistry, very often you want to yawn and say “Well, what does that really mean?” But, my God, you know when it’s not there, don’t you? And when I first saw David and Emily together, I completely believed them. I also think that David’s performance is particularly brave, because Aiden is a pretty irredeemable character. And for an actor like David who carries such a legacy of goodwill and love from an audience, it’s quite a brave thing to play a character like that. Emily’s natural gravitas gives her amazing credibility as a politician... Yet you also believe she's a mother... A tricky hire wire act!"

David Tennant talks about his role as Aiden Hoynes



"Paula Milne was really the first thing that drew me to The Politician’s Husband. I mean, she’s sort of television royalty, isn’t she? I just think she writes characters assiduously well, and she puts them in situations that are so dramatically delicious.

"Also, I love a bit of political drama; The West Wing is probably my favourite television series of all time. There’s just something about that world. There are very few areas in life where the stakes are so high; where the power struggles influence not just the lives of the people involved, but also the lives of everyone they represent. It’s almost Greek in that way, in terms of the stakes being so monumental and the power struggles going on in that world being so petty – and yet so universally important.

"I also remembered The Politician’s Wife being a really big deal when it came out in 1995. I came back to it before we started filming The Politician’s Husband and it was fantastically juicy to watch. Paula really caught that moment in time when a certain echelon of the ruling classes began to realise, perhaps, that they weren’t able to get away with whatever the hell they liked anymore. It was the beginning of the end for a certain type of politics – or at least of a certain type of public life, anyway. And I think she told that story very well. The Politician’s Husband isn’t a straight sequel. It’s inspired by similar territory, I suppose, but the story is very much drawn from today’s world.

"The character I play in the drama is Aiden Hoynes. He’s a member of the cabinet and he’s very well regarded. He’s clearly seen as a potential leader of the future. It’s probably not helpful to find real-life political candidates to cast him as – I didn’t base him on one particular individual (which is probably just as well because I don’t think that would have done anyone any favours!). But he’s certainly a man who’s doing very well for himself.

"So at the start of the story he feels that his moment has come, that the Prime Minister of the day is not performing as he might, and that this is his moment. He stands up in the House and argues that the Prime Minister’s immigration policies are xenophobic and that the PM’s position is effectively untenable. How much of that is driven by ideology, and how much of it is a power play? That’s a very grey area, really – it’s hard to say where one ends and the other begins. But the policy may be slightly less important than what he’s trying to achieve by wielding it.

"Aiden has a very solid marriage with Freya, played by the magnificent Emily Watson. She’s also an MP and doing quite well for herself, though she’s playing second fiddle to Aiden, who is the high flier. But they work very well together and they’ve always supported each other. In fact we learn quite early on that she writes Aiden’s speeches. They have two kids, Noah and Ruby, and a very happy family life. It’s made slightly difficult by the fact that Noah has Asperger’s and struggles a little bit with his parents’ public, high-stress lifestyle, but they manage to cope and they have a support network around them. But when the wave of support they expected to carry Aiden to his coronation evaporates in front of him, the roles are reversed. Aiden loses his frontbench job and Freya finds herself brought into the cabinet. And a marriage which had seemed so strong and impregnable suddenly finds that its fault lines have been exposed, and they have to cope with this very different power structure within their relationship.



"There is an aggressive streak in Aiden that emerges too. But then again he’s a man who is pushed quite far. He has had everything, and suddenly he has nothing. So I think it’s quite understandable that when he’s pushed into a corner, he comes out snarling and biting. As things go on, however, we find that Aiden and Freya aren’t quite the golden couple they believed themselves to be, and that comes out quite violently within their relationship at one point, and in quite a shocking way.

"Another key character is a politician called Bruce Babbish, played by Ed Stoppard. He and Aiden have known each other for many, many years. They’ve come up through the ranks together, though Aiden is certainly seen as the senior of the two. And Bruce is apparently right behind him, fully expected to serve in an Aiden Hoynes cabinet and to be part of his inner circle. So at the start of the story, it’s very much Bruce and Aiden who are preparing for this big moment – this moment of assassination. But, as with many things in politics, Aiden quite quickly discovers that Bruce’s friendship and loyalty aren’t necessarily all they seem. It becomes clear quite quickly that Bruce has leadership ambitions of his own, which have been subsumed in the wake of Aiden’s much more obvious route to power. It all happens within the first few minutes of the series so I don’t think it’s giving too much away to say that Bruce ends up backstabbing Aiden.

"Before filming began, I tried to do as much research as I could. There were a few different elements to delve into. Firstly, there was Noah’s Asperger’s condition. We were helped brilliantly by people coming and talking to us. I wouldn’t want to betray any confidences by going into that too much, but people were very honest with us, which was hugely humbling, actually, and very helpful for the roles. When you have a child with Asperger’s, you can’t always communicate in the way that you would normally expect. It can rob people of a normal life – and that is a huge part of the story here.

"And then of course there was the political world. Over the years I’ve talked to many politicians about what their lives are like. But for this I just decided to let the production team gather our sources. I didn’t want to use or abuse any social links, I suppose. So we had some people come in to talk to us, and they were very honest about their experiences. What I found fascinating to imagine was the sheer stress of that life – the burden of it, I suppose.

"But at the same time you could sense the buzz that people get out of it, too; the high that you get when you deliver something well in the House is like having a fantastic first night on stage and getting all the best reviews. It gives you that kind of a hit. And that’s what they’re chasing, a lot of the time. There’s something quite egotistical about that. But if it comes from a sense where they’re trying to change things for the better, I suppose it can be a pure and virtuous thing as well.



"I had a certain amount of say in Aiden’s look. Looking at a lot of the political faces we see regularly on the news, I was struck by how coiffed they are. They often seem to go for a sort of Eighties soap star kind of look. But then of course that’s what is expected, isn’t it? You’re expected to look sleek and slick. And I guess you also need a look that you can contain through a day when you’re doing four different things at once. So I wanted to find something that gave a sense of that.

"Filming the drama certainly gave me an insight into why politics appeals to people – particularly that sense of the intoxication of power. And the fact that you’re making decisions that will change people’s lives. I can see why people are drawn to it. I can see why people devote their lives to it. There are such huge opportunities there, and such crushing disappointments, too. It’s sort of Shakespearian in that way. It’s like a history play in the making.

"What will real MPs make of the drama? I think they’ll love it. They’ll love it because at the end of the day it’s a great bit of drama. It’s got all the hooks and surprises of a thriller, but with the depth and the texture of a quality character piece – because it’s written by Paula Milne, and she knows what she’s doing. So I think everyone will love it. But I dare say politicians will love it all the more because they’ll see their own world reflected back at them. It’s a really fascinating and intriguing series."

Emily Watson talks about her role as Freya Hoynes



"The first thing that attracted me to this was that it was a cracking piece of writing. It's just a gripping story between these two characters. I also think Freya is quite an unusual female character. She's strong, faithful, sexual, political, ambitious, she's a mother; all of that rolled into one. She's a lot of different things that are usually compartmentalised into different packages in female characters.

"When we first meet her, Freya is the junior education minister. She's seen as a high flyer with big prospects. We also know that she met Aiden and Bruce at university. So the story I constructed in my head was that they were probably all at Oxford together - all very brilliant, clever young people. In the beginning I think Freya probably wanted to change lives; I think that's innate in her. But I think they also quickly learned to embrace the political way of thinking. They're people who came through the Westminster system from a young age. They probably started off as interns and have learned how to work the system.

"You don't end up being an MP or a cabinet minister without being unbelievably ambitious. But the interesting thing about Freya is that she has an emotional intelligence to go with that. Which means that she deals her cards in a more subtle way. Aiden is such a blunt instrument in the way that he tries to achieve things. He lets his lower nature get the better of him. Whereas Freya has a full orchestra of subtle, womanly ways at her disposal. And she knows how to use them.



"Outwardly they look like a normal family with a nice suburban home, a couple of kids and successful careers. But that only scratches the surface. Their sexual relationship is quite interesting, put it that way! Their sexual tastes are slightly to the left of usual; quite edgy and aggressive. I think they're the sort of couple who, if they have a problem, solve it in bed. They don't necessarily talk about things in the way they should. I think that's one of the interesting things about this drama. It takes a public couple and then shows you what happens behind closed doors, to reveal an archetypal power struggle between two individuals.

"There is one particularly shocking scene between them. I can't say too much about it, in case I give too much away, but basically Aiden's lower nature gets the better of him. It was quite hard to film. You just have to get through a scene like that, really. You have to go for it and then forget about it - and hope you don't have to emigrate! (I don't think I'll be doing the school run for a while). But it is an important scene in the drama. It's a turning point for the two of them. It sets them on a path that they can't get back from.

"Their son Noah, who has Asperger's, is a very important part of the drama, especially in terms of David's character. I think when Noah's Asperger's became evident, Aiden basically couldn't deal with it. He stepped away from him. And in a way I think he is overcompensating in politics; he becomes more and more driven because he can't find the normal solace of what a human relationship provides.

"I did quite a bit of research after taking on the role. Before filming started, Paula and the producers arranged for us to meet various different people, to get a sense of that Westminster world; the politics with a small 'p', as it were. So we met up with various MPs. It was very interesting to see what their concerns were. Some were very concerned about the party politics and the power struggles, the back-biting world of Parliament. There was an impression that that was the be-all and end-all of politics. At the other end of the spectrum you got people who were really driven to do good and to improve people's lives. And I think both the main characters in this drama, Freya and Aiden, are an interesting mixture of those two things.

"We also met with a mother whose son has Asperger's. She was a brilliant and very impressive woman, but you could see how distressing it had been for her family - what an enormous challenge it had been for them. To her it felt like something that had landed in their lives that they weren't equipped to deal with. They were just having to cope with it on a daily basis and it was never going to change, never get any better. When she turned up she basically said, "Look, I decided on the way here that I'm not going to beat around the bush - I'm going to be honest with you about how hard it is. I won't do the soft sell on it. I'm just going to tell you what it's like." And we were in tears by the end. It was really distressing. You could see how destructive it can be on family life.

"Obviously Asperger's is a huge spectrum. There are people who have it very mildly and people who have it intensely. But within that there's an awful lot of variation with a lot of different symptoms and behaviours. But I think for them it was that they couldn't go on holiday because the change of routine would have meant total disruption. Unless they kept the same routine and never did anything different, all hell was let loose. Of course some of that feeds into the drama. To be a parent in that situation and to also have a challenging job, to be relying on a nanny, and grandparents - I think Freya feels a very intense sense of guilt.

"Aiden and Freya clearly operate in a very cynical world. There's one scene for example where Freya has to make a speech in Parliament. It's her maiden speech in the House of Commons and it's a complete bear pit. Everyone's yelling at her. And it goes very well. But if you actually analyse the speech, it's really total BS! There's nothing to it. It's just a sort of point-scoring exercise. So she manages to be a complete success without saying anything of substance whatsoever. I thought that was really interesting. And I have to say I got a real kick out of filming that scene. It was really fun.



"The House of Commons scenes were filmed in Wimbledon, in the studios where they used to film The Bill. There's a permanent set down there, which is about three quarters the size of the actual House of Commons. But we also did quite a bit of filming in the real parliamentary offices - for Aiden's office, and Bruce's flat. You could see Parliament from the windows. It was pretty cool to feel that we were right at the heart of things. We even had a security scare. Fortunately it was nothing serious. Somebody's car had broken down in the street so they closed the whole thing down and we couldn't get in.

"For me, one of the most interesting moments in the drama was being interviewed by Kirsty Wark. In one scene in episode one, Freya agrees to an interview with her, and she gets a grilling. Obviously Kirsty filmed those scenes herself. It was amazing to meet her. I've followed her career and feel like I've grown up with her. And she was lovely. In the scene she basically turns on me and goes in for the kill. I have to say that felt quite real.

"I've never really been involved in politics myself. I think I went on a couple of marches when I was at Bristol, but that was about it. I didn't take it any further. It's not really my world. As for actually being an MP? I'd be hopeless, hopeless, hopeless! I'm just not organised enough. I need other people to organise me. I have enough difficulty running my own life, let alone other people's."

The Politician's Husband was commissioned by Janice Hadlow Controller, BBC Two and Ben Stephenson, Controller, BBC Drama Commissioning.