This England review: Boris Johnson drama is ‘too soon’

Kenneth Branagh is “utterly convincing” as the former UK PM Boris Johnson in This England – but the “fiction based on real events” contains extremely distressing scenes and fails as a drama when those events are still unfolding, writes Neil Armstrong.

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In a preview of this six-part drama about the first few months of the coronavirus pandemic and the UK government’s response to it, one newspaper wondered with regard to Boris Johnson, “Just how damning a portrayal will this be?”

There was a widespread expectation that This England’s co-director and co-writer Michael Winterbottom, whose politics are assumed to be very different to those of the recently departed prime minister, would be letting Johnson have it with both barrels.

In fact, the biggest surprise about this series is that, ostensibly at least, it does not seek to apportion blame. The PM, played by Kenneth Branagh, and other members of the government, including the Health Secretary Matt Hancock (Andrew Buchan), are largely depicted as doing their best under very difficult circumstances. Their responses may be inadequate, their concerns misdirected but, it is made clear, they think they are doing the right thing. There are no “villains” as such. The virus is the bad guy.

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This England is essentially an account of Johnson’s first months as prime minister, focusing on his government’s handling of the crisis but also interweaving stories relating to the virus’s impact on the NHS and nursing homes and vignettes of families losing loved ones.

It opens with the on-screen notice “This is a fiction based on real events”; a tricksy formulation that allows the filmmakers to claim verisimilitude while also exercising a considerable amount of artistic licence. What is fact and what is fiction? It is a particularly fraught issue when it involves actors playing real, living people. Did Johnson really say this? Did his chief adviser Dominic Cummings (Simon Paisley Day) actually do that? Is this how Carrie Symonds (Ophelia Lovibond), the prime minister’s girlfriend, truly felt?

A date appears on the screen – “23 April 2019” – and we hear an off-screen announcement at an event that the “very long-awaited biography of Shakespeare by Boris Johnson will finally be published in April 2020”. This is the first instance of the pretty heavy-handed dramatic irony that features regularly in episode one.

April 23rd is the date on which Shakespeare’s birthday is generally marked and the bard is threaded through this drama. Branagh’s Johnson quotes him often and the title of the show is taken from a celebrated speech in Richard II – “this blessed plot, this Earth, this realm, this England” – the full significance of which becomes apparent at the end of the series. And, of course, the whole thing is a tragedy of much more than Shakespearian proportions, with the national stage eventually metaphorically littered with tens of thousands of bodies.

Actual news footage marches us quickly onwards through Theresa May’s resignation; the police being called to Carrie Symonds’s flat; Johnson entering Downing Street. We eventually switch from archive footage to Branagh et al on 12 December, 2019, with an exit poll predicting a big Conservative win and an exultant Johnson leaping from his seat.

For the role, Kenneth Branagh transformed himself into Boris Johnson (Credit: Sky)

Cummings tells Number 10 staff early in the first episode that they will be focusing on long-term strategy. “We don’t want to be distracted by events,” he says. The line evokes Harold Macmillan’s supposed response to being asked what a prime minister’s greatest challenge is: “Events, dear boy, events.” And from the off, the Johnson administration is bombarded by events: coronavirus is confirmed in the UK; the NHS is buckling under the strain; lockdown; there’s a shortage of personal protective equipment; the prime minister is dangerously ill.

Scenes tend to be quite short and there are a huge number of settings and characters. We move rapidly from Downing Street to a hospital, the Department of Health, a Sage meeting, a care home. And amidst all the drama about the politicians, there are the stories of ordinary people afflicted with the virus and then – more often than not – dying.

How many scenes of people gasping for breath are you comfortable watching? Because there are a lot. How many scenes of the bewildered elderly residents of nursing homes? How many scenes of exhausted medics on the phone relaying the devastating news of the death of a loved one to the bereaved?

There is a “disturbing scenes” warning before three of the six episodes and anyone who lost someone in the pandemic should take this seriously. Some extremely distressing and very realistic scenes of patients in great suffering and dying left me wondering what purpose was served by them.

In an interview, Ophelia Lovibond described the project as “trying to help make sense of a really confusing time through drama”. Kenneth Branagh suggested: “Any way of understanding it better is important.”

It’s a laudable aim but on these terms, This England is a failure. How can we “make sense” of something as senseless as a pandemic? And while we are, as a nation, still coming to terms with the events depicted on screen. Indeed, they are still unfolding. The rapidity with which this was made seems bizarre. And why “a fiction based on real events” rather than a documentary? It used to be said that journalism provides the first draft of history. Now, it seems, hard on journalism’s heels, comes a high-profile six-part drama.

This England also contains what feel like serious missteps, such as the Johnson dream sequences, for instance. Several of these surreal black-and-white episodes would not look out of place in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. There are cowled figures standing by a river and a sombre-looking Carrie holding a screaming baby while some of Johnson’s adult children intone quasi-mystical reproaches to their father. Johnson is a public figure and therefore, arguably, fair game. His children are not.

Then there is that clunking dramatic irony. In the first episode Johnson gives a triumphant post-election speech to jubilant staff at Conservative Party HQ, promising that 2020 will be “a year of prosperity, growth and hope”. Cut to a shot of thousands of bats flying from a cave and then a shot of a Chinese wet market. Subtle it ain’t.

However, the performances are terrific. Admittedly, Branagh, who apparently spent two hours in make-up every day, looks less like Boris Johnson than he does a man who has spent two hours in make-up, but it doesn’t matter because he has the politician’s speech patterns and physicality and is utterly convincing. Lovibond as Symonds is tremendous. One of the series’ most powerful images that does not involve a death is when a distraught, heavily pregnant Carrie emails the seriously ill prime minister a scan of their unborn child with the message “We both love you”. The scene in which she holds their newborn son for the first time provides a very welcome moment of joy. Meanwhile, Paisley Day plays Cummings as a ruthless, borderline obsessive who is by some measure the least sympathetic character in the piece. You would love to be a fly on the wall if Day and Cummings ever meet.

Yet This England’s adherence to actual events strips it of some key elements of a traditional drama. It’s difficult to build dramatic tension, for example, when we already know what happens to Johnson, Hancock, Cummings and the rest. Character development – usually a character adapts and changes over the course of a story – is tricky to do when your characters are real people. There’s a half-hearted attempt to give Johnson a “lessons learned” narrative arc, but it’s not entirely persuasive. And, again, it’s difficult to see what the point of it all is. Viewers who sit through the entirety of this often-harrowing series might be reminded of another Shakespeare line and wonder if, ultimately, this isn’t a tale “full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing”.

This England is on Sky Atlantic and streaming service NOW on 28 September.

★★★☆☆

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