From the outside it doesn’t look like much. Number 10 Downing Street isn’t Buckingham Palace, or the Winter Palace, or the White House, but a modest-looking townhouse on a street of townhouses. But this relatively anonymous dwelling has been the seat for centuries of Britain’s government, the residence of the Prime Minister and the meeting place for the cabinet.
The 1983 British television series “Number 10” (out June 30 on DVD) dramatizes seven of the country’s most prominent Prime Ministers from before living memory. No Margaret Thatcher or Winston Churchill here. Instead, the series begins during the Napoleonic wars in the early 1800s and travels into the following century for the installation of Britain’s first Labour Prime Minister, Ramsey MacDonald, in 1924.
A cast of top British actors takes turns in the PM’s seat. Richard Pasio plays the shrewd but eloquent Benjamin Disraeli, who redecorated Number 10 at his own expense. John Stride gives the U.K.’s World War I leader, David Lloyd George, a lively spin, cavorting with his secretary as his wife turns a blind eye. Perhaps the most interesting episode concerns MacDonald, played by Ian Richardson with the wry good humor of a schoolmaster who realizes the curriculum is a bit daft. Steering a treacherous course between Bolsheviks on the left and Tories on the right, MacDonald didn’t last long at Number 10, but set a precedent for tempering Britain’s plutocracy with a measure of socialist compassion.
