The war that everyone’s losing
Brexit: The Uncivil War (Channel 4)
ISHOULD be used to it now, and yet there is always something about the explanatory note at the start of a drama based on real events — in this case the referendum campaigns against and for Brexit — that sends a chill through the soul.
“This drama is based on real events and interviews with key people who were there. Some aspects of dialogue, character and scenes have been devised for the purpose of dramatisation.”
Ah yes they’re not exactly tying themselves down there, though with Brexit: The Uncivil War, there is probably a limit to how much can be “devised”, as the story is still so fresh, and even unfolding in what used to be regarded as the real world.
So here you have a “dramatisation” of events which themselves were often rooted in the creation of complete fictions, and by the way, there’s a war going on.
They’re accurate about that bit for sure, the “uncivil war”, which was either caused by Brexit or was happening already, just waiting for the blackguardism of the Brexiteers to ignite it.
And we did have fair warning of this drama too, since it has been known for some time that Benedict Cumberbatch would be playing Dominic Cummings, the allegedly eccentric genius behind the Leave campaign — perhaps a tad unfairly, the drama was immediately condemned on these grounds, though it hadn’t actually been made yet, as such.
Still, it wasn’t exactly unfair either, to point out that by engaging Cumberbatch, they were bound to be portraying Cummings as some kind of a hero, flawed or otherwise — flawed in the Sherlock Holmes sense of being occasionally misguided in his brilliance, rather than flawed in the sense of helping to bring on the biggest disaster to hit Britain in peacetime.
So I had not been alone in fearing this, but it probably wasn’t as terrible as most right-thinking people had expected.
Yes, Cummings was placed shamelessly in that movie tradition of borderline madmen who can see through the whole damn thing while their more conventional colleagues are mired in groupthink and received wisdom.
But it was made pretty clear that the two big lies about £350m a week for the NHS, and Turkey being allowed into the UK, were indeed two big lies.
And the portrayal of Nigel Farage and his rich mate Arron Banks was, shall we say, unflattering — theirs was no “caper”, as one might have dreaded.
Indeed we were reminded that Cummings and the posh lads were prepared to allow those ghastly individuals to do the heavy lifting about immigration and other such unmentionables.
The Remainer Craig Oliver, played as a decent enough sort by Rory Kinnear, gave us the bigger picture about the way characters like Cummings have these brilliantly disruptive ideas, which they then feel free to claim are ruined by other people — but since other people are the only ones who are ever going to be involved anyway at the business end of these arrangements, maybe it would be wiser all round for the brilliant disruptors to keep their great ideas to themselves?
So leaving aside its weakness on the disturbing sources of money for the Leave campaign, and various obviously totally made-up scenes, I felt that Brexit: The Uncivil War just about got away with it.
And frankly, TV drama deserved its shot, given the failures of TV journalism — it did not excoriate the BBC in particular, for demonstrating that the ancient notion of “balance” can be the gateway to hell, or even to Brexit. But it could have done.
Indeed, it’s hard to be finding fault with the hiring of the superstar Cumberbatch, when “objective” journalism has shown itself not just to be boring and deeply dishonest, but one of the least efficient means of establishing the truth of any proposition.
So let the dramatists devise their characters, dialogues and scenes, they can hardly do any more harm.