In this After Dark special, host Joshua Paisley speaks with Professor Steven Fielding, a political historian at the University of Nottingham, about the 2006 BBC drama The Amazing Mrs Pritchard. Written by Sally Wainwright (who would go on to create Happy Valley and Gentleman Jack), the six-part series imagined what would happen if an ordinary Yorkshire superstore manager won a landslide election and became Prime Minister—on a platform of moving Parliament to Bradford and asking the people what should go in the Queen’s Speech.

The series aired in October 2006, just after Labour’s 2005 victory on only 35% of the vote—when more people didn’t vote at all than voted for Tony Blair. Professor Fielding explains how Ross Pritchard embodied the frustrations of that moment: the sense that left and right no longer meant anything, that Westminster was a bubble of middle-aged men speaking gobbledygook, and that politics could be simple if only someone honest would take charge. She promises never to lie, wins 54% of the vote, and forms a cabinet of women from all parties who somehow get along perfectly—a “benign feminist populist” who declares car-free Wednesdays and lets the people write government policy.

But as Fielding reveals, UKIP saw something else in Mrs Pritchard. They set up a fake BBC page claiming “we are the real Ros Pritchard”—recognising that her populism, however well-meaning, tapped into the same frustrations that would fuel Brexit, austerity anger, and Nigel Farage’s rise. While The Thick of It offered no solutions beyond satire, at least Wainwright tried to imagine answers—even if they were naïve. The series ended on a cliffhanger about her husband’s money laundering scandal, never to get its second season.

From Westminster bubbles to the danger of authenticity in an age of manufactured politicians, this episode asks whether we’d actually want the honest outsider we claim to crave—or whether Mrs Pritchard really was a feminist Donald Trump.