Stonehouse's juicy plot was so odd and far-fetched it must be true

The plot of Stonehouse (ITV) was so ridiculous, I needed to resist the temptation to break out Google in order to fact-check the most ludicrous bits.

Remarkably, or embarrassingly, it was all true.

MP John Stonehouse really did get recruited by the Czech secret service in the early 70s and became perhaps the most inept spy in British espionage history…

And he also really did swim out to sea off the coast of Miami in an equally inept attempt to fake his own death.

And the crime really did get discovered when police in Australia – where he was living under a fake name stolen from a dead constituent – turned up at his door looking for, of all people, Lord Lucan.

You couldn’t make it up.

You could tell director Jon S Baird’s three-parter was leaning heavily into the absurdity of the story.”

From the opening animated credits and jaunty Henry Mancini-inspired score – which draw comparisons to movie capers like Catch Me If You Can and the Pink Panther – you could tell that director Jon S Baird’s three-parter was leaning heavily into the absurdity of the story.

If you’re looking for a deep-dive into the human impact of Stonehouse’s crimes, this is not the show for you. And, let’s be honest. why would you, when the man himself is such a fascinatingly odd character?

Stonehouse review — Matthew Macfadyen as John Stonehouse, who faked his own death in Miami.

Matthew Macfadyen’s Stonehouse is a bumbling imbecile, who I’m surprised could tie his shoelaces, let alone dream up such an elaborate plot. The actor played him with his tongue so firmly planted in his cheek that I’m surprised he could get his dialogue out.

Macfadyen’s real-life wife Keeley Hawes played the MP’s long-suffering wife Barbara, who can see right through her duplicitous husband’s lies from the start and gets some of the snarkiest dialogue of the entire series – much of it said through gritted teeth.

Stonehouse, along with the recent TV dramatisations of the Jeremy Thorpe affair and Duke and Duchess of Argyll divorce case, shows there’s a real appetite with the public for revisiting scandals of the past – rightly or wrongly.

The final scenes of Stonehouse did have an element of poignancy.”

While I’m sure the surviving relatives in these cases would question the frequently comic way the stories are told, they do make for undeniably juicy television.

That said, it’s to the credit of director Baird and screenwriter John Preston that the final scenes of Stonehouse did have an element of poignancy.

Despite everything that he’d done and the broken family he’s left behind, we finally got to see a glimpse of the human being beneath the buffoon. Sadly for him, by then it was too late.