Stonehouse (2023)

Matthew Macfadyen plays John Stonehouse, the Labour minister who vanished in November 1974, leaving a pile of clothes on a Miami beach, and turned up in Australia under a new identity. Written by John Preston, whose book became A Very English Scandal, this three-part drama plays it as farce, with Keeley Hawes as his long-suffering wife Barbara, and it is quick, funny and very watchable. The trade-off is depth: making Stonehouse a bumbling fool undersells a man later found to have been spying for the Czechs, and Sheila Buckley, who was part of the real story, called it hardly accurate at all.