You almost have to feel sorry for Sky. After spending 18 months building up to their big Boris Johnson drama, they end up releasing it at exactly the same time that British politics enters its own cliffhanger mode with drama that could rival any season finale.
This England – which tells the story of the start of Johnson’s premiership and the first wave of the Covid crisis – begins tonight on Sky Atlantic, starring Kenneth Branagh as Johnson and Ophelia Lovibond as Carrie. But should Sky have known better than to air it now? Generally the best real-life dramas follow a simple rule of thumb: time is on your side. Rather than rush out your first draft of history, much better to wait until the dust has settled – even if you do have Branagh on board.
Why didn’t This England screenwriter Michael Winterbottom take a lesson from The Crown head honcho Peter Morgan, who waited almost a decade after Princess Diana’s death before writing The Queen, his seminal film about Elizabeth II and her daughter-in-law? Or Russell T. Davies, who left it until the autumn years of his career before writing about the Aids crisis in It’s a Sin?
Move too quickly and you risk events coming back to bite you – which is exactly what happened here. When This England was being filmed, the UK was still in the grip of its third lockdown – a whole six months before partygate. When Johnson eventually resigned, filming had wrapped up, leaving Sky with the dilemma of whether to re-shoot their ending (probably wisely, they chose not to).
There are other reasons to take your time. A little bit of distance makes events much more interesting, and gives dramatists room for creative licence. Was everything in A Very English Scandal – Amazon Prime’s 2018 dramatisation of the 1970s Jeremy Thorpe affair – completely accurate? Not quite – but the passage of time made a little embellishment permissible.
When events are too vivid you end up with something that looks the way This England does: less of a drama and more of an impression show. Actors get judged not on whether they can tell a story, but how well they ‘do’ Matt Hancock or Sir Patrick Vallance. Hence all the Twitter jokes about the actor playing Rishi Sunak being too tall. It’s a challenge for the actors themselves, too – ‘These people are still on the front pages of newspapers while you’re getting wigged up to play them. You’re aware of eyes being on you,’ Lovibond told the Times.
There’s also the fatal flaw that everyone remembers exactly what’s going to happen. If you spent the first year of the pandemic in Britain, chances are you can all too vividly recall watching every press conference, anxiously awaiting the new diktat which would supposedly stop this airborne virus in its tracks. Do you really want to see it again already?
Familiarity is the buzzkill of drama. A few weeks ago I found myself killing time on a slow Sunday by re-watching Laura Kuenssberg’s Brexit documentaries on iPlayer. An odd choice, yes, but I found myself surprised by how much more dramatic they felt now they weren’t so current. Having given it long enough to for the days of ‘meaningful votes’ and the ‘Malthouse compromise’ to become a bit hazier in my mind, the various subplots made for much better television.
Who knows, perhaps This England will pull off a surprise. Winterbottom can certainly spin a decent yarn when he needs to – and thanks to some of the explosive lockdown leaks, he’s also got plenty to work with. Let’s not forget that James Graham managed to make a solid drama out of the Cameron-Clegg coalition negotiations, which were hardly dramatic dynamite.
From what we’ve seen so far, though, I’m not so sure it’s going to work. Branagh’s Boris staring out of windows as he rattles out Shakespearean monologues? Panicked phone-calls as the wheezing PM is rushed into hospital? It’s all a bit too hammy and obvious – even if foreign networks are apparently snapping it up.
Most of all, This England looks set to be overshadowed by current events. Back in June, the trailer managed to go viral on Twitter, as we all excitedly digested Branagh’s Boris impression. Yet up against today’s real-life politics and with Johnson himself nesting on the backbenches, it all seems much less urgent.
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