It’s a scandal that Sheen is allowed to spout his divisive poison on BBC1
NOSTALGIA is the enemy. Well, nostalgia and also the English, capitalism, Mrs Thatcher, the police, the English, middle-class swingers, Freemasons, immigration officials and did I mention the English?
Actor and director Michael Sheen’s spittle-flecked revolutionary rant The Way (BBC1) began with incoherent fury and became ever more deranged. These three hours spent denouncing England’s oppression of the Welsh eventually blundered to a close in a mess of disconnected scenes.
To accuse Sheen of losing the plot would be unfair, because he didn’t have control of it from the start. The story followed a warring family, the Driscolls, caught up in a protest march in their home town of Port Talbot which becomes a riot then a civil war.
Squads of security goons armed with assault rifles are sent in, followed by the Army with helicopters. With a bounty on their heads, the Driscolls flee — first on foot, then in the back of a lorry, by barge and concealed in coffins.
They’re constantly dodging English fascist vigilantes, flying the Cross of St George. ‘ We’ve been seeing a lot of these disease-riddled Welshies scuttle over the border,’ seethes one.
Finally, the family make it to the south coast and a dinghy across the Channel, to escape ‘Hell Island’. Dad Geoff drowns — sacrificing himself in an act of redemption, because he failed to live up to the Left-wing ideals of his father, Denny (St Denny’s ghost being played, of course, by Sheen himself). But Geoff’s junkie son Owen decides not to go, and magically returns to Port Talbot to begin a new life of peace and harmony. The end.
Not one scene made any kind of narrative sense. Dozens of Welsh refugees in a shanty town, living under tarpaulins, suddenly produced pristine red-hooded cloaks as identical disguises.
Owen’s East European girlfriend, Anna, suffered a complete personality transplant, changing from fiery freedom fighter to doe- eyed gormless sweetheart clinging on his arm.
Weirdest of all, the final episode began last night with an excruciating wife-swapping scene, with the Driscolls staring through patio doors at an auntie having it away with the neighbours.
Threaded through this nonsense was Sheen’s loathing of English nostalgia. Fragments of 20th- century imagery crackled across the screen — a Carry On excerpt, a flash of Benny Hill, the cast of Dad’s Army, footage of cricket on the village green, Floral Dance played by a brass band.
What did all this mean? ‘That’s the English for you,’ shrugged one refugee, implying everyone east of Chepstow is trapped in the past.
‘I want things back the way they were,’ sighed weedy Geoff. ‘If people stopped looking back to Then, the Now might be better,’ his ex-wife Dee snapped.
Sheen’s clout as a respected actor is the only reason this drivel was filmed. His vision of a better Britain appears to be one carved up into warring, Balkanised states. For the BBC to give him a platform to spout his divisive poison is a scandal.