Metro, September 2022
The first time we see Boris Johnson’s soon-to-be wife in This England, it’s footage of the actual Carrie Symonds brushing aside journalists teasing out salacious details about the “altercation” in 2019 – which ended in police being called to their flat. A few minutes later, we hear some off-shot giggling, Kenneth Branagh’s Johnson babbles that “power is an aphrodisiac” before a subtitle pointedly informs us that “Boris and Carrie’s baby was born nine months after they moved into Downing Street”.
When Ophelia Lovibond finally gets to inhabit Carrie herself for any length of time, she’s in a swimming pool in Mustique – that famous Caribbean holiday which became the subject of a standards inquiry. No wonder, then, that the initial impression of This England might be that it’s playing the first defining months of Johnson’s reign, marked by Brexit and Covid, for laughs – particularly given Lovibond’s previous experience on BBC comedy W1A.
“My reputation precedes me, eh! I hadn’t thought of it like that, but This England isn’t a satire,” counters Lovibond. “One of Michael Winterbottom’s directions was to make our scenes as naturalistic as possible, to make him believe this is a real couple. Forget that it’s Boris and Carrie, it’s just two people in love.
“But actually, when you are so aware that it’s them, you do have to work quite hard to put aside the things you’ve read in the paper.”
That’s what’s so fascinating about portraying Carrie Symonds in this story of Boris and the pandemic – she certainly seemed more of a central figure to No.10 than the usual Downing Street spouse. But Lovibond thinks much of the chatter around Carrie – of wallpaper choices and undue influence – veered towards misogyny.
“Some of the nicknames for her came from inside No.10 and the press gleefully printed them,” she says. “I’m instinctively wary of that sort of thing. We’ve done some meticulous research but I still don’t know what she’s actually like, so the idea that you would use a nickname in the press to inform a characterisation just felt like falling into a sexist trap.”
What Lovibond did find was someone “more tenacious, more intelligent than I had been led to believe.” She was particularly impressed by her involvement in the John Worboys case, where Symonds waived her anonymity to testify against the serial rapist. “I think that says quite a lot about her character in terms of her being unshakeable in her beliefs,” says Lovibond.
And indeed there is a moment in This England where Carrie tells Boris she’s so worried about Covid-19’s possible effect on her unborn baby that she wishes to move out of the super-spreading environment of No.10. Of course, we can’t know whether that exchange actually took place, but gradually the nuances of what was happening in that incredible period of early 2020 take This England further away from froth and into far more serious territory.
“When I watched the whole thing back I was quite surprised by how emotional I found it, especially the scenes in the care homes,” says Lovibond. “There’s a bit in the third episode where a medical professional decides to live in a caravan on her driveway to keep everyone safe. And I found that incredibly moving, the sacrifices that people made.”
So in the absence of a full public enquiry, This England is a chance to watch people trying to respond to an incredibly difficult situation in their own way – from Prime Ministers and their spouses to scientists, doctors and the general public.
“It really did take me back to what we went through together,” says Lovibond. ‘This England brings home that these were individual human beings with an individual experience, and so many lives were lost. They’re not just numbers. It’s really important to remember the human cost of what happened.”
All six episodes of This England will launch on Sky Atlantic and streaming service NOW on 28 September.
