Did the BBC mean for their dramatisation of the last days of Lehman Brothers to be utterly, cringeworthingly hilarious?
If they didn’t, they certainly did a good job making it look like they did.
In short: failed irony, bad acting and moral superiority all round.
In long: The hour-long show aired on Wednesday night featured all the sweeping generalisations about subprime, CDOs, bankers you might expect, as well as some weird scripture references , overly earnest analogies to the movie Fight Club and a very sweaty OCD-obsessive clown-like Dick Fuld. Not to mention the ill-placed sinister background music, an annoying winking narrator called Ace (bearing no explicable connection to anyone), suspense-lacking dialogue and a hinted at level of intrigue, subterfuge and conspiracy probably never yet before associated with the crisis.
Indeed, the story had everything you’d expect from a quality straight-to-video release.
There were bad jokes about office lighting — one scene where an increasingly broken Fuld just can’t get the lights to stay on in the bathroom — the bankruptcy process — stacks and stacks of paper documents being wheel-barrowed in, Thain’s penchant for expensive office decoration, and best of all Fuld punching a giant soft-toy gorilla. A reference to his self loathing perhaps?
Then there was the cast: a few token ‘heavyweight’ actors like James Cromwell –aka the farmer from Babe, Pig in the City –playing a prematurely aged Henry Paulson. British TV sit-com star James Bolam, as the gung-ho Ken Lewis and a career-reviving role for Michael Brandon (of British detective-classic Dempsey and Makepeace fame) as the brash tough-talking Jamie Dimon. And while we’re not quite sure who Henry Goodman (playing John Mack) was — he bore a striking resemblance to the late Bob Monkhouse; Lloyd Blankfein, meanwhile, confusingly looked like Bernanke.
(Bob Monkhouse?)
(Dempsey)
That said, the programme was definitely entertaining, and we would not discourage anyone from dedicating a whole hour to watching it.
Some of the best squirm-tastic moments included Henry Paulson addressing a room full of Wall Street bigwigs with the following rhetorically-minded and reflective prose:
Paulson: There’s no public money for a lehman bailout.
Mack: You’re hanging Lehman out to dry?
Paulson: The rest is f***d. We f***d it up. Not just you and me, all of us. The West. It’s done. It’s over. You want your grandchildren to end up speaking Chinese? The dollar’s going to go. Then Europe. Then this. US. This thing with cars, and stereos and hula-hoops. And we screwed it all up. We ran through it all. This stuff, and we’ve come out on the other side where it’s I don’t know, where is this place? We have this one weekend where we might be able to come up with something to hold it all together for a little while longer.
Some controversial blame attribution:
Paulson: Dammit Jamie, are you the only one at this table with no exposure to Lehman? Or are you so busy bombarding them with demands for collateral to notice that they’re going belly-up?
Dimon: How dare you! I have a fiduciary right
Geithner: Calm down Dimon.Clever irony from the BBC:
Blankfein: Tell me Jamie, can you value a CDO?
Dimon: No, but I know a man who could.
Mack: Can’t value a CDO?
Blankfein: Any man who says he can is full of s**t. You might as well pick a number out of the air.
The depiction of John Thain as a self-interested, weaselly, Bank-of-America bailout-stealing villain:
Thain: we’re not all exposed to Lehman to the same degree.
Mack: Community spirit, that warms my heart.
Paulson: You’re all exposed and you’re all in line in order of size. Merrill is next, then Morgan Stanley.
Thain: we’re not next what are you talking about? Have you read our quarterly statements Hank?
Paulson: Yes John I know your figures. I even know what you spent on breakfast. You’re next in line. Trust me.
Mack: Thain if you stepped away from the Bloomberg cameras long enough to read your own balance sheet, you’d see it was as bad as Dick Fuld’s.
Thain: We won’t be needing government money. (Because I’ve secretly courted Ken Lewis for a Bank of America bailout, without a concern for what happens to Lehman or the financial world).
And lastly, let’s not forget the scene in which Dick Fuld gets punched in the face by a de-spirited employee.
Related links:
Lehman Brothers: the (BBC) movie - FT Alphaville
Banking on blame - FT Alphaville
