Hard acts to follow: who would play Bertie and Brian?

PRESENT TENSE:LAST WEEK the BBC broadcast The Special Relationship, in which Michael Sheen completed his trilogy of Tony Blair portrayals. It was pretty good, especially thanks to Dennis Quaid's brilliant representation of Bill Clinton, but from the perspective of a sofa on this side of the Irish Sea it was hard to watch it without the giddy anticipation of one thing in particular: if the drama was focusing so much on the peace process in the North, it would mean that Bertie Ahern would have to show up.

Who played him? Nobody. He didn’t appear. I didn’t notice him even in the news footage that, interestingly, featured the real Blair as well as the real Gerry Adams.

Bertie was written out of the script and of history, just as he was written out of the recent Mo Mowlam biopic. Oh, imdb.com will tell you that the character list for that included David Trimble, Peter Mandelson, Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness, George Mitchell, Michael Stone, an elderly woman, a paramilitary thug and Bill Clinton again. But no one got their chance to ham it up as Bertie. In Britain, there is clearly no showbiz cachet in a promotional line that boasts “Shane Ritchie is Bertie Ahern”.

In the UK, they revel in docudrama, having stripmined recent political events and figures for ratings. Sheen's role in The Queenwill be his best known, but that was the reprise of his part in The Deal, about the Blair-Brown pact that lay at the heart of their subsequent power struggle. Robert Lindsay has played Blair twice too, taking a far broader, more satirical approach than Sheen's earnest reproduction. Blair, in fact, became a British prime minister whose screen portrayals outstripped even those of Thatcher and who began to challenge Churchill.

There have been other political reconstructions. David Blunkett got one. David Cameron and Boris Johnson got one together. Last night the Miliband brothers got theirs. It has happened because the era threw up intrigue and drama and gossipy thrills. But what political period doesn’t? What matters as much for broadcasters and writers is that docudrama is an easy sell to viewers, who are familiar with the characters before they even pop up on screen.

RTÉ is not above such dramas. In 2002, its screening of hep-C drama No Tearscaused a political crisis for Michael Noonan – even though it featured an unnamed "minister". It just happened to be played by Mark Lambert, an actor whose chief physical characteristic is his Michael Noonan-ness.

At the time, Noonan complained that the relevant scenes were made up. But this is drama, and its essence, its truth, is what matters. You couldn't expect that every conversation in The Special Relationshipwas a matter of historical record. Next month, when RTÉ airs When Harvey Met Bob, about Geldof and Goldsmith's Live Aid project, it will not be verbatim.

Aside from budgetary or other practical reasons, the dearth of Irish political docudrama is perhaps also a result of our parochiality. When Sebastian Barry used Hinterlandas a way of exploring the Haughey story in theatre, the work attracted opprobrium – largely because of content described as "exploitative", partly because it didn't hold together as a play. But it also attracted audiences.

Since then, though, we have had the Tribunals Show– which came from the transcript branch of the genre. And there are unsatisfying attempts at satire on the radio (when Ryan Tubridy recently welcomed Oliver Callan to The Late Late Showby declaring him "the man of a thousand voices" he really should have added " . . . but zero jokes").

But we wait for the straight-up docudrama. We have the raw material. At Christmas, the where-it-all-went wrong books sold in ways you'd like Irish bonds to, and among them was Pat Leahy's excellent Showtime – The Inside Story of Fianna Fáil in Power. Within it, surely, is the kernel of a drama.

You could imagine a sprawling epic based on the entire Fianna Fáil project for the past 15 years, its attendant tribunals, scandals, booms, busts, more busts, busts upon busts, banking scandals, bailouts and – at their heart – two leaders whose personalities became poison.

We can fantasise about HBO or Showtime or another US subscription channel funding several series of them. It could run for years, into box set after box set.

You could waste a great deal of daydreaming time imagining who would play Bertie, Willie O’Dea, Brian Lenihan, Seán FitzPatrick, Mary Harney and all.

For Cowen, I opened the question to Twitter. Every jowly actor around was mentioned – Timothy Spall, John Goodman, Philip Seymour Hoffman. They’re hardly realistic options, though. Ciarán Hinds came back as a smart suggestion, even if it would require a certain physical transformation.

But I think that, if we wanted to go very avant-garde, to really mess with the idea, there is only one man for the job. It would be a new departure for him. But he may relish it.

And I would love to see a promo line that declared “Philip Walton is Brian Cowen.”