Taken For A Ride:Roadkill.

"You can get anyway with anything if you brazen it out" - Peter Laurence.

When David Hare wrote that line for Hugh Laurie's character, Peter Laurence - a populist Tory who's both a 'rulebreaker' and a 'character', remind you of anyone?, it must have seemed depressingly true and when I watched the episode with that line included it registered likewise with me. But, by the time I watched the fourth and final episode of Roadkill (BBC1/iPlayer) something had changed. It felt like you actually couldn't get anyway with anything if you brazen it out.

Seventy four million Americans had decided they'd had enough of Trump's lying, they'd had enough of Trump's bullying, they'd had enough of Trump's racism, they'd had enough of Trump's support of fascism, they'd had enough of Trump separating mothers from their children and putting them in cages, they'd had enough of Trump's mocking of the disabled, they'd had enough of Trump's boasts of sexually assaulting women, and, perhaps most of all, they'd had enough of Trump's woeful handling of the Covid crisis which, as I write, has resulted in 240,668 deaths across the United States. The highest death toll in the world.

When I watched Joe Biden's speech this morning I heard him use words like respect, dignity, love, hope, compassion, and empathy. Words that are not only too long for Trump to understand but concepts that are completely alien to him and his lethal administration. An administration of, now, in his own words, stone cold losers. Over the last two days it has felt like a huge weight has been shifted from the world's shoulders and though there's a long way to go, and nobody imagines Joe Biden will be a perfect president, the process of healing the divisions exploited and widened by Trump and his fellow populists (Bolsonaro, Johnson, Modi) can slowly begin.

How could a television show like Roadkill possibly compete against the real drama played out on the news programmes on screens around the world? The truth is it couldn't. Roadkill was a good, solid, drama and one I enjoyed very much but it felt like one sent in from a different, more innocent, time. From a time when even the worst, most careerist, least moral, politicians at least felt they had to hide their true motives, disguise their nature, to succeed. It felt like a missive from a time before alternative facts, fake news, and distrust of experts.

Laurie plays Laurence as a cross between Rik Mayall's Alan B'Stard from The New Statesman and Ian Richardson's Francis Urquhart from the 1990 British series House of Cards. He's a popular, and populist, transport minister who uses regular appearances on talk radio with Mick 'the Mouth' Murray (Tony Pitts gets to channel his inner Nick Ferrari as a blunt speaking broadcaster) to give the impression he's one of the people.

Laurence bangs on about Brexit and Man Utd and fans approach him on the street and in supermarkets to get a selfie with him. But like the man he is most directly based on, Boris Fucking Johnson, Peter Laurence's seemingly affable, clubbable, hail fellow well met, manner masks a far far uglier persona. Laurence has been accused of using his exalted governmental position for profiteering and lying about said profiteering. 

The drama begins with Laurence's day in court. A case he wins but a case that is far from over. Set against a depressing Tory world of offshore funds, shell companies, NHS privatisation, SPADs, lobbyists, selling weapons to Saudi Arabia to kill Yemeni citizens, and complete and utter bare faced hypocrisy we see Laurence and his special advisor, the fantastically named Duncan Knock (Iain De Caestecker - so good recently in BBC1's Us), plot their way to the top with a series of power games designed to undermine Laurence's boss, and PM, Dawn Ellison (Helen McCrory). Ellison seems a more capable incumbent than Theresa May ever was but, that aside, the similarities cannot be a coincidence.

The Westminster world Laurence, Ellison, Knock, and Ellison's aide Julia (Olivia Vinall) operate in is fuelled by pillow talk, affairs are going on left, right, and centre - though mostly on the right, but though the relationships are far from sexless it always seems as if the sex is completely devoid of any love or romance. Sexual desires are met with the same urgency a man with diarrhea empties his bowels.

The transactional nature of even the most meaningful relationships are, sadly, not the only dispiriting thing about life in Toryworld.  At times the murky mood of double dealing, double crossing, and craven lusts for power, all underpinned by the insistent low key dread of Harry Escott's creeping score, renders Roadkill as bleak and unfulfilling as the Tory lifestyles it depicts.

Despite the surface gains, the large houses, and the regular sex on tap nobody seems remotely happy. That's how capitalism works. It's a system you can never be happy under because somebody, somewhere, will have more than you. Or, at the very least, somebody, somewhere, might have more than you. 

Laurence's family are mere collateral damage in his meteoric rise to power. Wife Helen (Saskia Reeves - like De Caestecker, wonderful in Us) seems to exist only to normalise Laurence and his daughters Lily (Millie Brady) and Susan (Ophelia Lovibond) have rebelled against their father's selfish nature in their own very different ways. Chain smoking Susan's returned from time on a Greenpeace ship off the coast of Greenland and Lily's papped snorting coke in a club and dancing off her tits to The Fall's Totally Wired.

My kind of girl! But not the kind of girl that Tories look fondly on. Her behaviour causes one scandal for Laurence but the discovery of a previously unknown daughter, one in prison for that matter, gives Laurence and Knock far more pause for thought. How he handles this, as much as how he handles his legal affairs, will decide if Laurence, who we see promoted to Minister of Justice early on in the series, continues to rise or starts an almighty fall.

Third daughter Rose (Shalom Brune-Franklin) has been incarcerated in the fictional, and dysfunctional, Shephill prison (managed by Parallax - a kind of cipher for hugely dubious companies like Serco and G4S) for high level white collar crime. From where she spars with the prison staff and plays a small role in a prison riot that brings Shephill, and her father, to greater national awareness.

Lawyers and the press are already only too aware of Laurence and his activities. Reporter Charmian Pepper (Sarah Greene - nearly as good in this as she was in the excellent Normal People earlier this year) is following the breadcrumb trail that will lead to proof of Laurence's wrongdoing but she's hamstrung both by her boss (Joe Torrens plays newspaper editor Joe as a cynical cross between Rupert Murdoch and David Yelland) and the fact that she's a recovering alcoholic and AA member.

At an AA meeting she recognises a familiar face. Luke Strand (Danny Ashok) is also on the wagon and he's also been involved in Laurence's court case as an assistant for the formidable and forensic Rochelle Madely (Pippa Bennett-Warner). Much dynamic exposition is served up during exchanges between Luke and Rochelle, ostensibly Laurence's 'legal eagles', and when Luke and Charmian, of course, start getting to know each other better the story is joined together as surely as their bodies are. But will Charmian, Luke, and Rochelle be able to bring down Laurence? Will his family problems be the undoing of him? Or will PM Dawn Ellison simply outmanouevre him in this seemingly interminable power game?

Or will he succeed? There are lots of scenes of people in glass partitioned offices looking at each other, looking away from each other, and pretending not to look at each other. There are lots of scenes of mid range automobiles pulling up outside tasteful houses, crunching autumn leaves beneath their wheels, at dusk. Parked cars in suburban drives, empty wine glasses, old fashioned audio cassettes, crisply ironed white shirts, and furrowed brows all blur together to create a programme that is incredibly retro in many respects.

"You don't want to mess with powerful people. They don't care about anyone but themselves" we hear at one point and it's a line that speaks for the whole programme and for the whole political mess we are hopefully starting, slowly, to leave behind us. When I started watching Roadkill my problem with it was that it didn't show just how brazen, just how corrupt, just how morally vacant the political sphere had become under the influence of professional rage harvesters like Trump, Johnson, and Farage.

By the time I'd watched the final episode my problem with Roadkill (an otherwise thoroughly well made series) was that it couldn't even hope to compete with the genuine drama we were all receiving from across the Atlantic and, I can still barely believe I'm able to end a blog on this note - after four years of despondency, it couldn't offer us any of the hope that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris now offer the world. If Peter Laurence succeeded or not didn't, ultimately, matter. He's a fictional character. In real life, for the first time in what seems like forever, the bad guy lost. We will live in a better and fairer world because of this.