Watergate

Thursday

Jonathan Aitken

My ringside seat at the Nixon resignation melodrama

American politics seem particularly febrile in 2024. The sitting President has withdrawn from the election, days after his predecessor was shot campaigning at a rally in Pennsylvania. But American democracy is by nature restless and tumultuous. It’s worth remembering that 50 years ago this week, Washington was in turmoil over the question of whether Richard Nixon was going to resign. Those early days of August 1974 seem like yesterday to those of us who became swept up in them. At the time I was a 31-year-old MP, five months into my first parliamentary term as an opposition backbencher. My summer recess took me to the home of a hospitable Anglophile

Wednesday

James Walton

Wonderfully naturalistic and intriguingly odd: BBC2’s The Gallows Pole reviewed

In advance, The Gallows Pole: This Valley Will Rise was touted as a radical departure for director Shane Meadows. After all, he made his name with the film This Is England and its three rightly acclaimed TV sequels, about a group of working-class folks struggling to survive against the heartless backdrop of that reliable old enemy: Thatcher’s Britain. Now, he’s giving us a costume drama set in 18th-century Yorkshire. In fact, though, it didn’t take long to realise that Meadows’s departure mightn’t be as radical as advertised – because the programme could easily have been entitled This Was England. Wednesday’s opening episode even began with a series of captions making

Friday

Stephen Arnell

A cinematic guide to Watergate

This June will mark half a century since police arrested five of Richard Nixon’s ‘plumbers’ breaking into the Democratic National Committee offices in Washington DC’s Watergate complex. This anniversary appears to have given TV executives the impetus to commission a wave of shows about the break in and its world-changing (if not an overstatement) after-effects. Both upcoming drama Gaslit (STARZ, from April 24th) and Netflix’s documentary The Martha Mitchell Effect concern the outspoken spouse of Nixon’s loyal Attorney General John N. Mitchell, who (to her husband’s ire) helped blow the whistle on Watergate. For her efforts, Mitchell was hounded and vilified as a drunk by Nixon’s cronies, with the former President declaring