Cartoon criminals

Coup! (BBC2, Friday) was quite a brave programme. It was the story of the failed mercenary coup in Equatorial Guinea, a tiny but oil-sodden tyranny on the west coast of Africa. This was led by an adventurer called Simon Mann (I have often said it is a great mistake to trust anyone called Simon, unless, possibly, they are in hairdressing) and supported by Mark Thatcher. It would have been easy to run this as a grim, heart-of-darkness drama, with lessons for us all about the evil nature of imperialism, or the vile conspiracies of multinational corporations. Instead, they played it boldly, to a large extent, for laughs. The clue was in the name of the writer, John Fortune, who is best known these days for his duologues with John Bird on Bremner, Bird and Fortune on Channel 4 — which, though a comedy, is one of the few serious programmes left on that station.

You might say that Fortune is an investigative satirist, trying to find out what is really going on, rather than settling for the same old reach-me-down targets. Anyhow, the mood of perky good cheer was maintained by using the drum-and-whistling jazz classic ‘Big Noise from Winnetka’ as the linking music. Even one of the final scenes, in which the plotter Nick du Toit is seen hanging from his arms in a dungeon, had the air of a cartoon. (I was reminded of one of the many New Yorker drawings: in this the suspended prisoners hear: ‘And now, for your further listening pleasure, we once again present Pachelbel’s “Canon”.’)

Mark Thatcher was played by Robert Bathurst, who most of us remember as the feckless but well-intentioned character in Cold Feet. He played young Thatcher as a feckless but ill-intentioned character, lazily assuming that a moderate investment of money and a pointless investment of equipment (an unusable helicopter) would allow him to sit back and earn millions with neither risk nor effort.