Like many institutions facing public scorn or indifference, Parliament has decided to explain itself through the medium of a fly-on-the-wall documentary. Inside the Commons (3 February) was the result; revealing, but only to a degree. Michael Cockerell, writer and presenter of this four-part series, promised it would be “the House of Commons as you’ve never seen it before”. And this was undeniably accurate: normally television coverage is tightly controlled, whereas Cockerell’s cameras roamed widely. What they showed us was an institution struggling to reconcile the needs of a modern legislature with centuries of tradition and housed in a nineteenth-century building in constant need of attention. Most viewers will not have been surprised by any of that, but this do
05 February 2015, The Tablet
House call
Inside the Commons
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