David Hare’s latest television thriller (18 October, 9pm), the title of which brings to mind rodents spread across country roads, all guts and matted fur, is extremely well-named, for it does indeed involve both much spattering and several rats. Everyone in it is paying the price for some bit of bad behaviour, their innards, metaphorically speaking, trailing behind them like bloody ropes. The message is that no one gets out of politics alive, not even those connected to it only tangentially. The civil service, the party hierarchies, the media: they’re the human equivalent of the machines used to slice loaves in a factory. You go in all fluffy and whole, only to emerge some time later, vastly reduced, looking as pale as a ghost.
But let’s get the silly stuff out of the way first. This one comes with minor notes of preposterousness that are really quite peculiar in a drama that is otherwise rather deft and exciting. At the centre of it all, for instance, is a Conservative cabinet minister called Peter Laurence (yes, Hare does Tory!) whose libertarian instincts find their ultimate home in his complicated private life. Laurence is played by Hugh Laurie, who’s brilliant in the part save for the fact that his character is supposed to have been born on the wrong side of the tracks (that’s Croydon to you). Do we buy Laurie as a barrow boy made good? I don’t, and halfway through the first episode, I noticed that he’d all but given up trying to inflect his voice with a piquant squeeze of Sarf London.
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