Diarist's guilty fascination

Here the author of the spoof version of Alan Clark's Diaries gives his views on the TV series based on his life...

We live in such a dull political age, dominated by politically-correct New Labour apparatchiks sipping mineral water while they email supportive comments to the excruciating Big Conversation website.

Nothing else explains our continuing guilty fascination with the rip-roaring characters of the political Eighties: and one character in particular, a Conservative backbencher who died in effective political obscurity in 1999 and hadn't had his hands anywhere near the levers of power for many years, yet who hypnotised everyone with sheer force of personality: the Rt Hon Alan Clark, reactionary, philanderer, High Tory romantic and diarist of genius.

His journals have now been dramatised by BBC Four, a slightly cerebral but nonetheless very enjoyable series due to be broadcast in the New Year with John Hurt as Clark and Jenny Agutter superbly cast as his elegant and longsuffering wife Jane, whom he cheated on but unceasingly adored.

The first episode was unveiled last night. I watched John Hurt's terrifically subtle performance with the admiration of a fellow professional. For I too have portrayed Alan Clark: but in print. In 1997, I wrote a spoof version of Clark's diaries for the Evening Standard. Alan was outraged; he sued and won, but throughout the High Court proceedings, I wrote up the sensational events from his standpoint: a conceit that exasperated him considerably.

I took the view that like Robert De Niro fattening up to play the overweight boxer Jake La Motta in the movie Raging Bull, I should be allowed to "get into" the role.

Sir Max Hastings, then Standard editor, allowed me exceptional latitude on my expenses so that I could lunch most days at Wilton's in Jermyn Street and drink fine wines and eat grouse just like the great man - in true method-acting style. The result was certainly enjoyable for me: but as a dramatic performance it was far less distinguished and subtle than John Hurt's approach to the part.

Hurt is very good at conveying the lascivious grin and the hopeless leer, and Clark's fastidious and occasionally slightly queeny manner: was there a hint of Quentin Crisp in the way he wore that now impossibly quaint item of gentleman's attire, the cravat? And Hurt is also excellent at Clark's thin-lipped expression of pique and childish hurt whenever any woman had the temerity to reject his roguish advances, which was really quite often.

The first episode begins in the early Eighties with Clark's tenure as a junior minister at the Department of Employment, as it was then styled, trying desperately to bluster his way through without mastering the brief. And this dramatisation scores heavily by pointing up his relationship with his secretary Jenny Easterbrook, tremendously well played by Julia Davis.

Clark fancies Easterbrook madly and her scorn for him only fans the flames of his secret passion. Yet she softens a little, warning him that the Parliamentary Committee proceedings he will shortly have to endure are "batty. Completely batty". Davis's performance was a revelation for me.