A Close Look

- [Reporter] One of the country's most popular politicians brought off the gamble of his life this afternoon when a jury found for the transport minister against a newspaper which claimed he had exploited his position in government.

- To quote the national poet: "Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just."

(suspenseful orchestral music) - "Roadkill" is a political drama about the price of success, success in the political realm, what it demands of the people who do it and those around the people who do it.

- Prime Minister.

- Ah, Peter.

You're a member of government again?

- Wasn't aware that I'd left it.

- I play a character called Peter Laurence, an up-and-coming Tory cabinet minister.

- And Peter Laurence is a charming- - Working class, charismatic- - Sociopath, (laughs) for want of a better word.

- He began as a carpet salesman.

- Retail, selling furniture, property, ah, then politics.

- He is the real article.

He is the person who has made their own way.

- The interesting thing, being offered a David Hare script, is what can you do with this, what can I make it?

And then to add Hugh Laurie to the mix is just a dream come true for a director like myself.

- When we first join Peter Laurence, or when the story begins, he has taken the unusual step of suing a newspaper in a libel case, which is, generally speaking, not something that politicians do or are advised to do, and he has bent the truth to some degree to serve his purposes.

He gets away with it, but is almost immediately met by another obstacle.

- On your personal, came through yesterday, I didn't want to bother you till after we got the verdict, it's somebody that says she's your daughter.

- Which one, the one who doesn't speak to me or the other one?

- Neither of them.

- So Peter's wife Helen has sort of trapped herself in music, lived in Hastings to really have the quiet life, and her life is blown apart by the revelation that Peter's got with a mistress and an unacknowledged daughter.

- Do you know that Dad has a girlfriend, or do you simply not ask?

- And it's about he is sort of trying to manage these events from his past while still staying true to his motto, which is to endlessly move forward.

- Let there be no mistake: I am going to shake things up.

- The world of "Roadkill," it's invented inasmuch as it's not about existing political characters, but I think it's identifiably true nonetheless.

- I think it does a really good job of giving a nice overview of the climate that we're in and the political situations that we put ourselves in.

- It's not Britain in the past, Britain in the future.

It's an alternative reality.

It's a story.

It's a drama.

- You get to see day-to-day inside how government power works.

- It lets us see the human interactions of these ministers, and really the human politics behind the politics we're watching on the news.

Also takes us to the press.

- But the case fell apart when key witness for the defense, journalist Charmian Pepper, surprised the court.

- I'm gonna nail Peter Laurence once and for all.

- It's called "Roadkill" because it is the fear of all politicians.

I mean, one of the things I'm writing about is the idea of disgrace, and I suppose you could say of 21st century politics that it's sort of disappeared from public life, the idea of disgrace.

In the 20th century, then, if you did something wrong, then you had to apologize and leave public life.

And one of the things this series is asking is can you actually do something bad enough to get thrown out of public life?

It seems to be absolutely impossible now.

- It's a Europe in free-fall economically, and we have the same problems that have been facing Britain for the last 10, 20, 30 years.

- Let me tell you something about the British identity.

We lock people up.

We're famous for it.

We do it in the interests of public safety.

- And to punish.

- So women's prisons, and the state of women's prisons, is a very important element of "Roadkill."

David was very keen that we show the truth of what it is to be in prison, and through Rose, who we find out is Peter's daughter that he didn't know about, we start to experience prison life for women in prison in the U.K.

- Now, I have long felt that our prison system is a disgrace, and I always feel a debt to the people who are trying to do good in British prisons, because really, nobody cares.

Nobody cares about the prison system.

I don't know exactly what the statistic is, but it's something between 50 and 60% of women in prison have themselves been victims of abuse, either violence or sexual.

And the idea that what we do is throw them in the prison and lock away the key is a great scandal in this country.

- Have you been in a prison before?

- A few of my constituents have ended up inside.

- Mm-hmm.

But you're full of stupid ideas.

- Am I?

- Your party is.

- So you're not a Conservative then.

- It would've been very easy for David Hare to write something that either satirized the opposition or proselytized his own point of view, and he chose not to do that.

He chose to do something that's sort of honest.

They are just people.

They're people trying to do something that I know I could not do.

I would not last half a day as a politician.

- Well, I wanted to write about the Conservative Party, because really, there's very, very, very little drama written about them.

I was brought up in the 1960s so, you know, it looked to me and to everyone of my generation that Britain was going to turn leftwards.

It didn't.

It turned rightwards.

Why?

What's the reason for that?

It's meant to be about the idea of putting as strongly as I can what the case for conservatism is, and by implication, I hope also what I think the case against conservatism is.

- There're no heroes in this, and I think that that is a very interesting story to watch, that they're people quickly moving around in a shark pool.

You know, they're quick and they're bright and they're ambitious, but they're honest.

- I was humiliated in court when I couldn't tell what I knew.

Can you imagine what that's like?

- The sort of center of the show is also family, and I think everybody can relate to that.

- Doesn't cast too many opinions on the characters.

It's situational and it lets the audience make their own minds up.

- Marriages tremble and fail sometimes.

People fail at their job.

They are betrayed by their coworkers.

And this is a way of showing truths about what it takes to succeed in the political world that I think people will be very interested in and will respond to because I think they will sense the truth of it.

- This is not a revelatory piece about something that David Hare discovered.

This is a discussion in his mind about what politicians are really like.

- It's about a central character who prioritizes freedom above all else, who believes that human beings are born to be free, to make their own decisions and to take their own responsibility.

We here all the time in the West that freedom is the priority, and "Roadkill" is an examination of what freedom is and what it means in politics.