Ken’s Boris perfect for Covid-calamity drama
This England
Sky Atlantic, streaming
Inside Man
BBC One, Monday/Tuesday House Of The Dragon
Sky Atlantic, Monday
On New Year’s Eve 2019, I wandered around London with my two sisters. We had cocktails at the Goring, the posh hotel where Catherine Middleton and her family spent the night before her wedding to Prince William. We went on to Winter Wonderland, the seasonal funfair in Hyde Park, and rode a rollercoaster that turned us upside down five times, then to a Turkish restaurant under a railway viaduct on the South Bank for a slap-up meal. Finally, we joined thousands of others at the London Eye to watch the fireworks.
I was powerfully reminded of this last carefree outing across the water while watching the first episode of Sky Atlantic’s This England, Michael Winterbottom’s riveting account of the Westminster response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Footage of those very same fireworks featured at the start, with happy people welcoming 2020 and all it promised. That also was the day, though, that China confirmed the existence of a new respiratory virus, one that felt very far away.
At the time, the UK government was more concerned with personalities and policies. Boris Johnson had just won a sizeable majority in the House of Commons, and was promising to get Brexit done. His Machiavellian apparatchik Dominic Cummings was firing and hiring special advisers in an attempt to shape the way the UK was governed, largely getting rid of anyone close to Johnson’s then girlfriend, now wife, Carrie.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock seemed to be the only one taking the virus seriously, but so little was known about it back then, including how it was transmitted, the overall response was slower than it should have been, costing many thousands of lives.
The human brain is an extraordinary organ, capable of filtering memory in such a way that timelines often become confused. This England told the story chronologically, and there were many moments that landed like right hooks. The initially poor advice on PPE, the wildly miscalculated predictions of infection rates, the fatal decision to send older people from hospitals into care homes that sentenced many of them to premature deaths.
It has been argued that making a drama of all this right now is too soon, that we should wait for the dust to settle before making a drama of what still, let’s not forget,
is an ongoing situation. Exactly 1,000 new cases in Ireland were logged this Tuesday alone, and 20 new deaths this week, figures that would have made us shudder in the uncertain days of early 2020.
The genius of This England is in the way that it is told, exploiting memory and turning it into foreboding; we know what happened,
but we still can be surprised. With a cast of hundreds – in Downing Street, at COBRA meetings, at SAGE briefings, among the press – its sprawling reach nonetheless is tempered by the personal. At its heart is a howlingly funny portrayal of Boris Johnson by Kenneth Branagh, unrecognisable under heavy prosthetics. There is a great
deal of pathos in this flawed prime minister, overly reliant on quoting Shakespeare and the Classics, yet seemingly unable to reach any of his many children on the phone, and comfortable being himself only when he and Carrie are alone.
Kudos too to Simon Paisley Day, whose Dominic Cummings seems to be just as sociopathic as the real thing, more concerned with disrupting traditional democratic norms than he is with the day-today business of government. There are six episodes, and I will bingewatch the rest as soon as I can.
I can’t exactly say the same for BBC1’s Inside Man, which has yet to live up to its promise. Created by former Doctor Who and Sherlock showrunner Steven Moffat, it bears all the hallmarks of his plotting ingenuity, though with a great deal less plausibility than we might have expected.
Without revealing too much, a USB stick containing images of child sexual abuse (I really wish they’d stop calling it ‘child pornography’, which implies a certain level of agency was involved where none is possible) leads maths grinds teacher Janice (the brilliant Dolly Wells) to believe one of her pupils, teenage Ben, is a paedophile. Ben’s father, vicar Harry (the ever reliable David Tennant) assaults her to stop her going to the police, and as things now stand, she is a captive in the family basement.
Janice gets an emergency text message to her friend, journalist Beth (Lydia West), who is in the United States to interview Death Row inmate Jefferson Grieff (Stanley Tucci, brilliantly intellectually brittle).
Beth invites Jefferson to help her find out what is wrong with Janice, and so we have a transatlantic race to rescue her. The US side works best, all darkly humorous and sardonic. The English side, though, is a bit of mess, with ordinary suburbanites committing acts that would have been unthinkable to them even that morning. I know this is Moffat’s point – anyone can be a murderer – but there has to be some clue in a person’s overall make-up to get us to believe that. So far, it is missing.
As for House Of The Dragon, also on Sky Atlantic, two of the main characters were recast in their older selves this week, with Emma D’Arcy now playing Princess Rhaenyra, and Olivia Cooke as Queen Alicent. The latter has acquired a gravitas unseen in her youthful self, but spirited Rhaenyra has been subdued, perhaps by giving birth three times in the intervening decade, her children the result of an affair rather than by her husband Ser Laenor Velayron, who is much more interested in one of his knights.
It all has got deliciously intriguing, and perhaps the youthful fire Rhaenyra showed will be restored, though based on early reports of tomorrow’s episode seven, that might prove a false hope.