Having been alive during the last five years of Margaret Thatcher's premiership, she exists to me only as a vague memory somewhere in the back of my head along with Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor and riding on the back of my mum's bicycle, Re-Run style. And on film, and having tea with Gordon Brown, obviously. As such, I was quite looking forward to finding out what got Maggie interested in politics in the first place, what gave her drive, what made her tick. After watching this lighter-than-air "drama", I have little more idea, to be honest.

The subtitle of this one-off drama was "How Margaret Might Have Done It" to which, I assume, you could add "But Probably Didn't". But then again, what do I know about what Maggie was like in the '50s? Maybe she was a Bashir-era Diana-a-like with big doe eyes and pouting lips, and maybe she did flirt and manipulate her way through her early life. I just don't see it, somehow.

You can't blame Andrea Riseborough for having the time of her life playing Margaret Thatcher nee Roberts, because the script was so nudge-nudge-wink-wink-say-no-morwa that it would have been utterly ridiculous to try and play the role straight - after all, no-one else did. So she gurned and hammed it up and presumably had an absolute blast. She got a lot of the Thatcher mannerisms down to a tea, but the accent was inconsistent at best - at times she sounded more like Ronni Ancona's impression of Audrey Hepburn than a grocer's daughter from Grantham. It was wonderful, then, when the script allowed her to show some real steel (or iron), because then we saw what Riseborough really can do, and, I would imagine, more what Ms Roberts was really like.

But those moments were few and far between, as the writer Tony Saint seemed much more interested in crowbarring as many in-jokes as he could into the script. And I really do mean crowbar - when little Mark grabbed a copy of The Jungle Book out of Carol's hands he said "when will you ever go into the jungle?" I was tempted to switch off my television there and then, to be honest.

I didn't hate this, it was fairly fun, I suppose, but I learnt absolutely nothing about the early life of a woman who had such a huge impact on the state of our country, nothing I could trust, at any rate. Maybe Saint didn't intend it to say anything, but if not, why not? This programme was, to be frank, ninety minutes' worth of an opportunity wasted.