TELEVISION It’s around a year since Lehman Brothers went bust and this week we got two programmes marking the fact. Since one was a documentary and the other a fiction we were able to do what we rarely can: measure how the fictional account matched the documentary one.
The fiction (The Last Days of Lehman Brothers, BBC2 Wednesday) was more exciting. It had a terrific Anglo-American cast, which must have cost about as much as three days’ salary ($20m-$50m annually) of the former head of LB, Dick Fuld. It was high on superlatives: when the bankruptcy of Lehman was first mooted, one character said it would be “like Rome selling the Vatican to the Japanese and hiring the Pope as a bell boy”. In portraying the events, largely within the New York Federal reserve, on the weekend of September 12-14 last year – as Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe, marshalled there by the then Treasury secretary Hank Paulson (a wonderful portrait by James Cromwell), strove to find a way of avoiding LB’s crash – it kept tension high, even though we knew they would fail.
Yet the documentary (The Love of Money, Thursday BBC2) showed the limits of fiction, nowhere more obviously than in the portrayal of Fuld. Corey Johnson, who played him in the fiction, did a perfectly fine job of the CEO as a wrathful and arbitrary god, ruling through kudos, vast wealth (the Lex column of this paper gave Fuld its “Overpaid CEO” award in 2008), and terror. But he could not match the man in full, whom we saw in the clips from internal presentations. In one, he roared at his staff that he wanted to “rip out their [competitors’] hearts and eat them before they died” – and was applauded. Handsome and broad-shouldered in his early sixties, he was described as regally indifferent: striding about the 31st floor, glowering beneath a jutting forehead, acknowledging no one.
Still, the fictional account allowed its creators more fun. A conversation between Ken Lewis of Bank of America and John Thain of Merrill Lynch a little before the first swallowed the second had Lewis reflect that BofA was now funding art exhibitions of works “which insult everything you and I have spent our lives building up”. (Thain had just spent over $1m redecorating his office as Merrill Lynch sank – including $1,400 for a wastepaper basket). Hank Paulson gave a great speech to the collected bankers which I’d bet as much as one five-millionth of Fuld’s former salary he never thought, let alone said: “The world is f*****, and we f***** it up. You want your grandchildren to speak Chinese? If not, we have this one weekend when we can come up with something to hold it all together for maybe a little longer.” They failed: the Chinese are still learning English.
ITV’s stab at doing a series based on Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple – a lady “detective” of a certain age – began with Marple: A Pocket Full of Rye (ITV Sunday). It was satisfyingly 1950s – the women in New Look full skirts, the police driving Wolseleys and a maid called Gladys who said “I fink” and “I never”, while Miss Marple, her kindly employer, muses aloud that “one doesn’t really know what to do with the Gladyses of this world”. Someone else did: using her as an unwitting poisoner, he wrung her neck – to be rumbled by Miss Marple, who saw the whole complex plot from the mountain top while the inspector still thrashed about the foothills.
Julia McKenzie’s Marple was delicate, gentle and imperturbable; like all other Marples, she cannot escape the shade of Margaret Rutherford, who played the part in four films between 1961 and 1965 in a way that combined keen intelligence with baroque eccentricity, wholly enchantingly. The new version had its charms, but they were mild ones.
Most charming – not mild – programme of the past week was Leslie Woodhead’s contribution to Beatles’ week (Storyville: How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin, BBC4 Monday), on how the group undermined the Soviet Union. Woodhead’s films – particularly the remorseless Cry from the Grave and Srebrenica: Never Again, on the massacre – always prompt reflection. Here he returns to a theme he broached in a tremendous 1992 piece (with Reggie Nadelson) on Dean Reed, the American rock singer adopted by the Soviet Union: the place and effect of rock in a closed ideological system.
Many of his interviewees (slightly too many) affirm that the Beatles destroyed the USSR more effectively than Mikhail Gorbachev – a view I doubt would stand up. The real glory of the film was the people and events it captured: Josif Kobzon, the USSR’s official songster, doing “Hey Jude”; Belorussian rocker Yuri Pelyushonok getting his old combo together to sing a special composition on the effect of the Beatles (“Hey, pal, don’t wake the people!”); and best of all, Kolya Vasin – “I’m sure God sent them to us” – a bearded Russian mystic out of Dostoyevsky by way of Liverpool, who created the Beatles museum over 40 devoted, demented years. This Storyville production showed what one can do with care, time and devotion: lead us to understand something of the universe so that we can be, not its masters, but a little more its citizens.
More columns at www.ft.com/lloyd
