Credit Crunch TV - A mirror held up to the credit crunch

A BBC drama about the downfall of Lehman Brothers hopes to educate us to avoid a repeat of our mistakes. But can it tell us anything we don't already know? James Rampton reports

(bbc)

The Last Days of Lehman Brothers, an absorbing new BBC2 drama about the collapse of the venerable Wall Street bank this time last year, opens with the line: "If you talk to 100 people, 102 will tell you they hate bankers." To many people, the word "banker" has become a piece of rhyming slang and the film explores why bankers have replaced estate agents as society's most-loathed professionals. But The Last Days of Lehman Brothers – a drama whose events are ripped straight from the news pages – also poses many other vital, universal questions. Why did the failure of this particular institution trigger a global financial nervous breakdown? Why did loans to sub-prime customers in the Mid West of America have such a catastrophic effect across the world? And, most crucially, can we stop it happening again?

Charting the rollercoaster events from the close of business on Friday 12 September 2008 to the following Monday, when Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy protection in the US, the drama focuses on the cataclysmic meltdown of the 158-year-old bank. The complacent theory had always been that the august institution was "too big to fail". At the time, it was worth $639bn (£394bn) and was the equivalent of the 18th largest economy in the world. During the course of that weekend, though, the US Secretary of the Treasury, Hank Paulson (James Cromwell from LA Confidential), refused to listen to the increasingly desperate pleas of Lehman Brothers chief executive Richard Fuld (Corey Johnson, United 93), a man so scary he glories in his nickname, "The Gorilla". Paulson decides to let the bank go bust "pour encourager les autres".

In the drama, which was actually shot in Lehman Brothers' now-vacant offices in the London Docklands, Paulson declares that allowing the collapse will "be the play that washes away all our sins". But in making that play, he brings about the largest corporate failure in US history. He also sparks fears of a domino effect and precipitates the gravest global financial crisis since the Great Depression of 1929. It is a massive gamble that spectacularly crashes and burns. Only four days later, Paulson goes cap in hand to the US Congress, begging for $700bn to bail out the entire financial system.

Although the crisis was cogently covered in news reports, The Last Days of Lehman Brothers draws viewers into the drama in a way that a dry documentary featuring balance sheets and banking experts never can. Like United 93, Bloody Sunday or In the Name of the Father, The Last Days of Lehman Brothers tells the human story behind the headlines.

The film's producer, Lisa Osborne, also responsible for Little Dorrit, says the story was easy to adapt. "As soon as you hear the timeline, you think: 'This is the classic ticking-clock drama. We have only got 48 hours to save Lehman Brothers and stop the whole financial system collapsing.' It's like a disaster movie – can we prevent this ship from going down?

"The film portrays a unique situation – what will happen if the bank can't pay its creditors on Monday morning? That has never happened before. But at the same time, it's a universal human story about pride coming before a fall. It's crying out to be told as drama. Documentary interviewees can be guarded, and cannot recreate the immediacy of drama. Often you find a deeper truth in fiction than in documentary,"

The Last Days of Lehman Brothers works because it humanises its characters. If you depict all bankers as mere cartoon baddies, then you will never properly engage your audience. By the end – when Fuld is a broken man, punching his toy gorilla in fury and whimpering on his knees – you don't exactly feel sorry for him, but you do understand how he got there.

Fuld has received many good offers for his bank, but has rejected them all as insultingly low. So when the curtain comes down on Fuld there is an element of Greek tragedy about this potentially great man felled by his fatal flaw: overweening arrogance.

Osborne observes: "By the end of a drama, you want to know human nature and some aspects of yourself a little better. If we had produced a drama that simply reinforced people's prejudices about bankers, then we would have failed. Many people think that bankers are all bastards who deserve their comeuppance. But it was a human being who made those mistakes at Lehman Brothers. Yes, Fuld was wrong and he was greedy, but he was also human. What drama does is allow you to walk in someone else's shoes and understand their thoughts and desires. It lets you feel their blood quickening."

Sitting in the mock-up of Fuld's office beside a statue of a cowboy struggling to control a bucking bronco – an apt image for the banker's career – Johnson weighs in, saying The Last Days of Lehman Brothers gives us the human side of the story. "We should never forget that we're just like these characters. We're all 99 per cent animal and one per cent human, and it's the human part that causes all the trouble."

It is only fair to point out Fuld was playing by the rules. Osborne says: "Banking has worked since the Middle Ages on a balance of greed and fear. If you lose one or the other, the system doesn't work. But in the 25 years after the Big Bang [the sudden deregulation of the UK financial market in 1986], bankers lost their fear – they felt they could never lose money and believed the government would always bail them out, so it didn't matter what risks they took. The weekend Lehman Brothers went to the wall was the moment fear returned with a vengeance." Until then, Fuld was merely buying in to the consequence-free culture.

So, can drama help to change things? Johnson is glum. "The desire of drama is to educate," reflects the actor, who hails from New Orleans. "But the reason drama still exists after some 3,000 years is because people tend not to learn from it. Drama keeps showing us the lessons of history in the hope that we won't repeat our mistakes, but we always do. We're blinded by our desire for self-gratification."

We rarely heed the lessons of history; otherwise the South Sea Bubble of 1720 would have been a one-off, rather than a disaster doomed to be replicated again and again. Johnson sighs: "We haven't learnt from the Lehman Brothers collapse. There is too much money to be made. When was the last time you heard business cry out, 'We have to stop making so much money'? The people who bailed out the banks – you and me – are getting charged more and more and the banks are making more and more profits. It's bound to happen again."

Osborne is equally uncertain about the future. "The Last Days of Lehman Brothers attempts to explode Gordon Gekko's 'greed is good' philosophy. But it's also an examination of the West and the choices we have made for our own gain. Is this life we've chosen, a life devoted to endless accumulation of wealth, the correct one? Is this the right way to run a globe?"

In the end, all Johnson hopes is that The Last Days of Lehman Brothers will move us. "At its best, drama can illuminate something that you can't otherwise put your finger on. When it works, it sends a shiver down your spine. That's why we keep coming back to drama. Isn't it a bit more compelling than watching some washed-up celebrity eat a kangaroo's testicle in the jungle?"

'The Last Days of Lehman Brothers' is on BBC2 on 9 September