Cruel Britannia: what if Ukip ruled the waves?

Nobody has a clue what’s going to happen in the general election, but we can be sure of one thing: Nigel Farage will not be the next Prime Minister. Channel 4 none the less ponders the unpalatable with a new drama. Ukip: the First Hundred Days (Monday, 9pm) puts the pound-shop Enoch Powell into Number 10 and watches the nation rapidly unravel. “None of the events that follow have actually happened,” we are advised, and yet the mockdocumentary format uses footage of inflammatory speeches and indefensible gaffes which manifestly have happened. Farage (who only appears in real news clips) will take no pleasure from the contents. Ukip is characterised as full of racists on whose watch the country implodes, as unemployment surges and protests mount at the widespread arrests of illegal immigrants. Their balm for the nation’s wounds? Bunting and a bank holiday. Ukip: the First Hundred Days joins a hidden heritage of what-if television dramas waiving all sense of plausibility and visiting a parallel world of extreme government. Many were broadcast in the Seventies, a time of political disillusionment and anxiety about invisible state power. In 1971 came ITV’s The Guardians, which imagined the expulsion of the Royal Family and England under a Fascist government and its eponymous paramilitaries. The talky drama rested in the factional squabbles among oppressors and oppressed: few viewers sat through all 13 parts. Nevertheless, the BBC weighed in with its own dystopian riposte in The Donati Conspiracy (1973) and its sequel, State of Emergency (1975). Here the military were actually running the show, while the underground opposition had a lot in common with actual Euro-terrorists such as the Baader-Meinhof gang. What if? Priyanga Burford plays a Ukip MP in Channel 4’s fictional documentary about a shock victory at the polls But the BBC had not yet slaked its thirst for conspiracy. Two series of 1990 followed in 1977. Power now resided with the Home Office and its body of bureaucratic oppression known as the Public Control Department after a power grab triggered by a national bankruptcy. In this hellish future, unions are rampant, the House of Lords has gone, taxes are through the roof and, in direct antithesis to Britain’s current preoccupation, emigration is strictly controlled. Drama’s paranoid delusions shifted focus when Margaret Thatcher gained office and anxiety turned to covert power-mongers. Chris Mullin’s 1982 novel A Very British Coup was dramatised by Channel 4 in 1988 and starred Ray McAnally as PM Harry Perkins, a working-class leftie who wanted no Nato or nukes. A powerful nexus of transatlantic interests deftly manoeuvred him out of office. When Channel 4 rebooted it in 2012 under the new title of Secret State, post-9/11 fears of an establishment lining its own pockets had mutated. Doveish, hyper-idealistic PM Tom Dawkins (Gabriel Byrne) attempted to defy an unelected ratking of vested interests all clamouring for a lucrative military tilt at Iran. “You get to the top,” concluded Dawkins, “and you realise it’s really only the middle.” And so to Ukip: the First Hundred Days. It’s all good fun (a clip of Neil Hamilton captions him as deputy PM), but the film’s power is slightly diminished because of its choice of main character. It follows the rise of Deepa Kaur (Priyanga Burford), the marketable face of Ukip and its female Asian MP, as the scales fall from her eyes. It would have been bolder to watch a white van man coming to question his political conscience. But perhaps that would have been too much of a stretch, even for a what-if dystopian drama. Jasper Rees