Metro, September 2022
There’s an absolutely crushing sequence in This England where countless people with Covid lay dying in care homes and hospitals, relatives forced to say goodbye through closed windows or via iPads. It’s genuinely incredible television. Michael Winterbottom’s bravura commitment to drama with a documentarian’s eye is in these quiet moments a reminder to us all of not just the sacrifices made during the pandemic, but the genuine – if sadly fleeting – sense of community, care and togetherness that characterised those early months of 2020.
The problem is, these scenes are midway through the third episode of Sky’s six parter tracking the tumultuous first months of Boris Johnson’s time at No.10. Up to that point, Boris Johnson has bumbled through Brexit and book deadlines, an impending pandemic and his new partner’s pregnancy – to the extent that it would be easy to write off This England as a mild, even relatively kind, satire.
Of course, it doesn’t help that Boris Johnson is such a caricature in himself that it’s impossible not to be amused by Kenneth Branagh’s portrayal of him – which is physically brilliant even if the voice sometimes veers into David Frost territory. Winterbottom has argued that they wanted to bring more weight and seriousness to Johnson rather than just pastiche him, but when your feckless lead character’s lines seem almost entirely from Greek myth or Shakespeare, that’s a hard sell.
So for all Simon Paisley Day convinces as Dominic Cummings – to the point where you can almost sympathise with his choices and attitudes when he’s dealing with such a mess – it never feels like the main players in government are anything deeper than adept impressions of people looking at ominous modelling and making (or putting off) decisions.
Perhaps that’s why the more naturalistic scenes in care homes, hospitals and locked-down semis feel so much more powerful. There’s no baggage with these people; they are the quiet heroes trying to make the best of a defining moment in all our lives. Ultimately, that’s the subtly powerful message of This England – it’s just that it takes far, far too long to make it.
