According to Anthony Smith, the editor of 24 Hours at the time, the film led to "the biggest and most furious row that a television programme in the English language has ever provoked.
Historian Jon Lawrence commented that "the programme was widely viewed as a deliberate attempt to undermine the folksy, down-to-earth image of Wilson and his fellow Labour ex-ministers by presenting them as driven above all by money and personal ambition.
[10] During Wilson's interview in his room at the House of Commons,[11] Dimbleby asked him to reveal the precise fee he had been paid by The Sunday Times for the serialisation rights of his memoirs.
[5] In addition to Wilson, the documentary features interviews with former cabinet ministers including James Callaghan, Roy Jenkins, Denis Healey and Barbara Castle.
[7] As Nick Robinson argues: "Instead of defending the management and inquiring afterward into whether they'd carried out their jobs properly, the governors had taken over editorial control at the prompting of a political leader.
[7] Journalist Robert Kee thought at the time that the programme was "a vulgarly brilliant equivalent of the newspaper cartoon" and that it was "the duty of a healthy Fourth Estate to reflect some [disrespect].
"[16] In an internal contemporary memo, John Crawley, assistant to Charles Curran, thought "the title and the commissioned song ... [gave] the programme the flavour of malice that ruined it.