God bless Netflix: I’ve just watched all 28 episodes of Foyle’s War, the 1940s detective series set in Hastings and London that first aired on ITV more than 20 years ago. Pedants may have spotted minor anachronisms or been irritated by London scenes filmed in Dublin, presumably for tax breaks. But for me, the whole oeuvre – Spitfires, ration books, moustaches and all – stands as a monument of meticulous and compelling period drama.
And as an amateur actor who always struggles to keep a straight face on stage, I’m in awe of Michael Kitchen’s gift of expressing Detective Chief Inspector Foyle’s moral outrage and inner pain by the tiniest twitch of a cheek muscle. The jail-cell scenes, in the episode in which a former PoW wrongly accused of treason (played by Andrew Scott) is subtly revealed to be Foyle’s own son from an adulterous first world war romance, deserve an all-time Bafta in their own right.
But here’s my beef with this masterpiece from the screenwriter Anthony Horowitz. There isn’t a single honest entrepreneur in the entire series. From the American industrialist who stole his British partner’s gearbox design, to the shipyard owners caught claiming wages for nonexistent workers and the father-and-son import-export tycoons with a Nazi shrine in their cellar, they’re spivs and profiteers to a man. Befitting the genre, they also have an unusually high propensity to commit murder.
Why is there never a heartwarming drama about the contribution of decent business folk to the war effort or, for that matter, any other human effort? All those uplifting stories of struggle and triumph I hear from entrants to The Spectator’s Economic Innovator Awards: no one ever makes so much as a sitcom about them. Impecunious writers may think profit is sin and lean further left if they want to be commissioned by the BBC, but the risk-taking independent producers and financiers behind Foyle and his ilk are themselves diehard capitalists. Do they never say to their creatives: just for once, can’t you make us the good guys?
Robbin’ the rich
Mind you, even I can see the appeal of the Robin Hood legend of robbing the rich to pay the poor – which as it happens we have adapted for pantomime this year in my Yorkshire hometown of Helmsley. As usual, I’m frocked up as the dame; in this scenario, that makes me the entrepreneurial landlady of the local inn, who makes more dough (to bake buns) to make more dough (dosh, obviously) to pay punitive taxes to the wicked Sheriff, who (spoiler alert) is finally unmasked as my long-lost lover. Cutting-edge satire it’s not, but it does feature a nodding teddy bear called Sir Keir.
Come to think of it, another television series I enjoyed this year turns the Robin Hood trope into a vivid parable of broken Britain. Brassic, which first aired in 2019, chronicles a crew of petty thieves and weed-dealers – all golden-hearted, of course – in a dead-end Lancashire town where the legitimate businessmen inevitably turn out to be the biggest crooks. My favourite character is the intemperate farmer Jim, who provides a bunker for the cannabis plants and would be my nomination for home secretary in a Tory-Reform coalition. Running to no fewer than 50 episodes on Netflix and Sky, it will keep you laughing until the new year.
Antiheroes
My book of the year is The Curious Case of Mike Lynch (Macmillan Business) by Katie Prescott. It’s a biography of the Essex-born tech genius who built a software giant called Autonomy and sold it to Hewlett-Packard (HP) of the US for a sky-high $11 billion. Extradited to San Francisco on charges of criminal fraud in the sale process, he was acquitted but died ten weeks later, aged 59, in the freak sinking of his superyacht off Sicily.
Given his against-the-odds trial victory and tragic death, this first full account of Lynch’s life might have been expected to err on the side of eulogy. But not at all: certainly it depicts a brilliant digital pioneer, but this Lynch is also a corporate bully who (in the words of the judge in a civil case brought by HP in London) knowingly presided over Autonomy’s ‘illusory’ and ‘improper’ accounting practices. I knew Lynch slightly and glimpsed both the rebarbative tech titan who was Britain’s answer to Elon Musk and the likeable family man who was so relieved to survive his courtroom ordeal. Prescott deftly captures both faces of an authentic entrepreneur antihero.
Brief mention also for Buy, Run, Build (Bloomsbury), a handbook by the veteran
corporate turnaround specialist Charles Skinner – who offers an unflappable role model for any embattled chief executive of a collapsing company: Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond (played by Sid James), the provincial governor whose residence is shot to pieces in Carry On Up the Khyber. I’ll offer a prize, by the way, for the first reader to cite an honest business in any Carry On film.
Back to the future
I mention restaurants as often as I think the editor will tolerate but in truth I’m more interested in whom I eat with than where or what I eat. This year has been filled with merry reunions: to name a few: an Oxford tea party recalling a 1975 production of Oh! What a Lovely War; lunch with other college chums at the Ivy Café in Marylebone in honour of one of our cohort, the film director Alex Cox, on a rare visit from his home in Oregon; and a gathering of old banking colleagues, also dating from 1975, when I first set foot in the City as a summer intern, at Josephine Bouchon in Fulham Road.
Why bother harking back half a century? Because the dull, divided, near-bankrupt Britain of the mid-1970s seemed to offer no prospect but decline, yet a decade later every-thing felt so much brighter; and barring occasional economic setbacks, I’d say life has improved on most fronts for most people ever since. One day, let’s hope, we’ll look back from a happier, more harmonious era at the dismal year that was 2025.
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