2023 - 2023
Stonehouse is a three-part ITV drama from January 2023, dramatising one of the strangest true stories in post-war British politics. John Stonehouse was a Labour MP, a former Postmaster General under Harold Wilson, and on the surface a rising figure of the Wilson government era. He was also, it later turned out, an agent of the Czechoslovak StB intelligence service, codenamed Twister. And in November 1974, drowning in financial scandal and personal chaos, he walked onto a Miami Beach, left his clothes in a neat pile, and vanished.
He had not drowned. He had flown to Melbourne, Australia, under a dead constituent's name, to start a new life with his mistress.
The series is written by John Preston, who also wrote A Very English Scandal, and directed by Jon S. Baird. That pedigree tells you the tonal register immediately. This is not a grim political tragedy. It is British farce played straight, a comedy of errors about a man who kept making absurdly worse decisions and somehow briefly got away with them.
Matthew Macfadyen is John Stonehouse, and it is nearly impossible to imagine another actor carrying the part. Macfadyen has become British television's go-to face for men undone by their own ambition. Tom Wambsgans in Succession was fictional but cut from the same cloth. Peter III in The Great was a buffoon emperor played with real pathos. Stonehouse sits between them. Macfadyen plays him as a man who believes his own schemes right up to the moment they collapse, and then believes the next one, and the next one.
Keeley Hawes is Barbara Stonehouse. Hawes and Macfadyen are married in real life, which gives their scenes together a lived-in weariness that casting directors dream about. Barbara is not reduced to the betrayed wife. She is a woman who has clearly known something was wrong for years, is furious about it, and has her own pragmatism and dignity that the script refuses to flatten.
Emer Heatley plays Sheila Buckley, Stonehouse's mistress and eventual second wife. Heatley resists the obvious temptress reading. Sheila is in her twenties, in love with a man twenty-five years her senior, and completely out of her depth in a mess that is not of her making. The series treats her with more sympathy than most retellings have bothered with.
The supporting cast includes Kevin McNally, Dorothy Atkinson as Labour MP Gwyneth Dunwoody, Richard Hope, Danny Ashok, and Luke Smallbone as Stonehouse's young son. Each is doing character work in service of the bigger portrait.
Tonal hallmarks worth flagging:
Jon S. Baird
Director
Emer Heatley
Sheila Buckley
Kevin McNally
James Charlton
Keeley Hawes
Barbara Stonehouse
Richard Hope
Supporting cast
Dorothy Atkinson
Gwyneth Dunwoody
Luke Smallbone
Mathew Stonehouse
Danny Ashok
Supporting cast
On paper this is a story about fraud, espionage, and a faked drowning. In practice it is a study of self-delusion.
Stonehouse convinced himself he was a patriot while passing information to a hostile intelligence service. He convinced himself his failing business ventures were merely pre-successful. He convinced himself that walking into the sea in Florida was a reasonable response to his problems, and that nobody would put two and two together. The series is less interested in judging him than in watching the delusion work in real time.
He is not a monster. He is a man who could not face a single honest conversation, and so chose instead to fake his own death. The distinction matters.
It is also, quietly, a story about the women left holding the consequences. Barbara had to explain to her children that their father had drowned, and then weeks later had to explain that he had not. Sheila, pregnant and alone in Australia, waited for a man whose entire life was a lie. Both women get more agency here than the tabloid version of the story ever gave them.
Jon S. Baird directs with a light touch that lets the material breathe. The Miami sequences are washed in that specific sunburnt 1970s look, all beige suits and cheap aftershave. Melbourne is filmed as a kind of purgatory paradise, a nice enough place that is very clearly not home. Westminster is claustrophobic, all heavy oak and whispered conversations in corridors.
The production design earns its keep. Cars, telephones, hotel bars, newsprint, all of it has the texture of a BBC period piece without the staid seriousness that can come with that. The costume work on Macfadyen alone is worth mentioning. The wide lapels, the awful ties, the slow drift from respectable MP tailoring to on-the-run Florida holiday shirts. His wardrobe tells half the story.
Music is used sparingly. No wall-to-wall mournful strings begging you to feel sad for a conman. Scenes are allowed to sit in their own silliness or their own pain without being told which to feel.
Critics were mostly warm. Macfadyen's performance was universally praised. Some reviewers felt three one-hour episodes stretched the material thinner than it needed to be, and there is something to that. The real Stonehouse affair is the sort of story that could be told brilliantly in two hours or sprawlingly in six. Three sits slightly awkwardly between the two.
Audiences, however, loved it. It drew strong ITV ratings on broadcast and became one of the channel's talked-about dramas of early 2023. The true-story framing helped. Most viewers under fifty had no idea any of this had actually happened, and the show's first episode played to a lot of genuinely stunned living rooms.
It has become part of a small British television sub-genre. The affectionately-told true scandal. A Very English Scandal, A Very British Scandal, and Stonehouse form an unofficial trilogy of stories about 1970s-era Establishment figures whose private lives detonated in public. If that is a genre you enjoy, this belongs on your list.
It works because Macfadyen commits. Entirely. He never plays Stonehouse as a villain, never signals to the audience that he knows the man is ridiculous. He just plays the guy as the guy was, from the inside, and trusts the material to handle the judgement.
It works because Preston's script respects the audience. You are not told how to feel about anything. You are shown a man doing increasingly mad things and allowed to work out for yourself whether you find him tragic or infuriating or funny. Most viewers land on all three.
It works because the supporting cast is that good. Hawes in particular does more with a raised eyebrow than most actors manage with a monologue.
And it works because the story really is that strange. A British MP, a Cold War spy, a fake death, a mistress in Melbourne, a re-election bid from jail. You could not write it as fiction. Somebody already lived it.
Matthew Macfadyen
John Stonehouse
John Preston
Writer