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 Friends and Crocodiles
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Patrick Malahide plays Anders
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Patrick Malahide, one of the most highly regarded actors in the
business, had no hesitation about accepting the role of Anders in
Friends and Crocodiles.
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The character is representative of a
particularly arrogant breed of Nineties businessman. Seeing himself as a "master of the universe", the supremely self-confident chief executive
employs Lizzie as his protégée.
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Obsessed with newness, he won't listen to reason as he dumps his
company's solid, long-established holdings in manufacturing and pours
all its cash into much riskier, shiny new hi-tech businesses.
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As these
new investments crash and burn and the company's share price plummets,
Anders is forced to cut 20,000 jobs.
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At a stormy shareholders' meeting, investors are furious about the
cavalier way he has thrown away their hard-earned money.
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"It's amazing
what they've done, completely incredible," the investors fume. "One of
the biggest companies in Europe has been destroyed in just under two
years. It's a train wreck, staggering in its ineptitude. How could
clever people be so stupid?"
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The whole traumatic experience leaves
Lizzie shattered, and she needs Paul's help to piece herself together
again.
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Malahide has distinguished himself in a host of high-class dramas over
the years, from The Singing Detective, Middlemarch, Minder and
Inspector Alleyn on the big screen to The World Is Not Enough, Billy
Elliot, Quills, Captain Corelli's Mandolin and Sahara on the big
screen.
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A man who knows a good part when he sees one, Malahide was attracted
by the complexity of the character in Stephen Poliakoff's film.
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"Anders is a very powerful capitalist," muses the actor, who also has
a successful parallel career as a writer and (under the pseudonym PG
Duggan) penned the 1996 drama, The Writing on the Wall.
"But he is ultimately brought down by his own obsession.
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"Stephen knows
that period very, very well, and Anders is symptomatic of that era.
He's extremely intelligent, and yet at the same time he is caught in
that bullish Thatcherite zeitgeist and follows it blindly to
destruction.
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"It is fascinating to play someone so purblind to the consequences of
what he is doing and so convinced of his own abilities.
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"Common sense
goes out of the window in favour
of the fashionable theory that
everything must be rationalised. But the net result is that he ends up
with nothing and ruins the lives of thousands of small investors in
the process.
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"Anders had a perfectly decent factory making perfectly decent vacuum
cleaners, but it wound up making nothing at all. I suppose there is an
intellectual purity about making nothing - you have no overheads at
all!"
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Malahide continues: "Anders embodies the concept of clever people
being stupid. He's clearly no fool: he's built up a huge conglomerate. And yet he's got to a certain age and doesn't want to lose touch with the modern world. But in so doing, he wrecks thousands of lives.
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"Of course, he's not destroyed himself, he just glosses over the fact the company is a wreck and walks out of the shareholders' meeting leaving everyone else destroyed.
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"Stephen is not being didactic. Anders' business dealings are the most extreme example of someone throwing the baby out with the bathwater. He is so blinded to what he's doing that he loses touch with humanity.
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"Stephen is saying that we should never forget that humanity is what really counts. But that is a message that still resonates today, because business remains all-important."
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The actor still has a dedicated following from his many TV hits. "The
reaction varies, depending on where I am," Malahide reveals.
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"If I'm
walking past a building site, I get 'Oi, Chisholm' from Minder fans.
But if I go to a library, a female librarian will flutter her
eyelashes at me because she remembers Middlemarch.
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"But perhaps the highlight for me was the Singing Detective. It was
groundbreaking when we made it in 1986, and the amazing thing is, it
still is if you watch it today. Like all works of art, it is timeless. It's still extraordinarily original.
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"What I love about Friends and Crocodiles is that the whole drama is
extremely tangential in its approach," Malahide ruminates.
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"Rather
than being schematic, it is telling a story through its characters.
It's also wonderful that the two principal characters never actually
get it together. It's so refreshing that it's about something other
than sex.
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"When people ask me what Friends and Crocodiles is about, I tell them:
'It's a history of the Thatcher years told in the guise of a platonic love story'."
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