So, who saw The Project?

Pointless obv.

I think the programme-makers had decided politics wasn't compelling enough to keep a primetime audience tuning in. The real meat of the New Labour story (the ideological rift between old and new Labour / the Brown-Blair pact) wasn't there. Instead we just got a bunch of self-centred good-looking young people living in a big house together.

It's a shame, cos the sea change in opinion that occured in the late 90s really deserves a programme of its own. A Century of the Self certainly taught me more about New Labour. Has anyone here read Andrew Rawnsley's book?

I thought the ideological rift was made fairly clear. And it is only halfway through. *shrug*

I was expecting not to like it at all, since I gather it got viciously ripped into on Newsnight Review (what did they say? I didn't see that), but I thought it was... OK, well, not dreadful. It did bolt through history in a garbled mess of characters who aren't even introduced but I didn't think it was that appalling. I mean, I'll bother watching tomorrow's if I remember, at any rate.

So, the latter, but not an outright "destroy" vote from me. But then I know sod all about acting or scripting or politics or...

Mostly quite tedious, I thought. The need to cover 5 years of significant change in a short space of time meant the treatment of events in Part 1 was inevitably superficial, and this worked against the narrative. (The play reminds me a lot of Jeffrey Archer's novel, "First Among Equals", in this respect)

But what we really needed to see centre-stage in this sort of drama were people closer to Blair, Brown, Mandelson and Campbell. Our two lead characters were minor players who seemed to have no clue what was going on most of the time. So much for "lifting the lid" on New Labour.

I shall probably skip Part 2.