Too soon for a drama about COVID? Not with Branagh as Boris Johnson

In June 2020 the British director Michael Winterbottom (Welcome to Sarajevo) was approached by his friend and producer Richard Brown (True Detective) with an idea: would he be interested in “doing something” about COVID and Boris Johnson?

It wasn’t just the suggestion that was daunting, it was the timing of it: this was in the depths of the first wave of the COVID pandemic in the UK, with the country just emerging from a swingeing lockdown. There would be more, much more, to come.

Kenneth Branagh as Boris Johnson with Ophelia Lovibond as Carrie Symonds in This England.

“We had lived through something that was a once-in-a-century event,” says Winterbottom. “It seemed to me to be a thing that we would look back on later, an event that people will think about in many years’ time – it seemed that if you had the chance to do something about it right away, that could be interesting.”

The question for Winterbottom was what that interesting something might turn out to be. His own take on the pandemic was how confoundingly fast things had moved. He wanted to create a “retelling in a fictional format” (he hates the word dramatisation – “we’re not trying to dramatise this”) but it had to feel like things were hurtling headlong.

“Both from personal experience and from when we started talking to people, one of the surprising things about the virus was how quickly things changed, how fast it spread – and how quickly the scientists responded. By looking at lots of different people’s experiences across different areas, whether it’s in government or hospitals, in care homes, or at the scientists, you’re able to keep quite a fast-paced narrative – and to get that sense of a narrative unfurling.”

In order to look at a very singular catastrophe Winterbottom employs a very singular method: This England interweaves dramatisations (it’s still the best word) of key moments with archive footage from England and the world.

Kenneth Branagh as Boris Johnson.

“Each episode has more than 200 scenes,” he says. “We were just trying to focus on the virus and the way in which it impacts people. As soon as you know that bit of information about what this doctor has got to do or who is this patient or what the scientist is trying to do … then move on. We tried to keep that rhythm going by shooting a huge amount of material, then condensing it down as much as we could.”

It should be stressed that much of the footage of This England doesn’t come from England. Winterbottom’s study of the first wave of the pandemic recognises that it was a global pandemic, with cause and effect ranging worldwide.

“In that first episode in particular,” he says, “there’s a sense that things are happening in the distance, away in China or a little bit closer in Japan or Italy. So by using archive, you see it at a distance; it’s not personal.”

The title of the six-part series is taken from John of Gaunt’s famous speech in Shakespeare’s Richard II. Taken out of context it is often quoted as a hymn to England’s majesty: “This other Eden, demi-paradise/This fortress built by Nature for herself …”

Andrew Buchan as Matt Hancock, former Secretary of State for Health and Social Care.

But in fact John of Gaunt is highlighting how things have gone wrong in the sceptr’d isle. Winterbottom’s series also asks what went wrong in an island nation where 178,000 people to date have died, yet where the government insists to this day that it “got the big calls right”.

This England is the story of those big calls, as made by Prime Minister Johnson and his team, led by the formidable Mekon-like brain of his chief adviser Dominic Cummings (the man who famously got in his car and drove to a local town “for an eye test”, breaking stringent lockdown rules he had just helped compile).

Undoubtedly part of the initial appeal of This England is the sight of Sir Kenneth Branagh in his upturned spaghetti bowl Boris Johnson wig. It is as much a study of the man at the helm (and Branagh’s transformation is uncanny to the point of disturbing) as it is of the ramifications of his law-making.

“No matter how important your job (being prime minister), how critical the situation (a pandemic), you’re still a person,” says Winterbottom. “You have your relationship with your children, and obviously in the case of Boris Johnson, besides the fact that he had COVID, this period of time coincided with him having just had an exhausting six months – coming to power and then winning a general election; but then also in his personal life, moving in with his girlfriend [Carrie Johnson, played by Ophelia Lovibond], getting her pregnant, getting a divorce from his wife, having a baby … So the fact that all that was happening in parallel with COVID, it felt like it was important to get that in.”

Boris Johnson and Carrie Johnson in the garden of 10 Downing Street after their wedding in 2021.Credit:AP

But bringing in personal lives and private meetings opens Winterbottom up to the charge of authorial invention. How much of this actually happened?

“It says at the beginning of every episode that “this is a fiction based on real events”, so it’s not as though these are verbatim accounts. Obviously, the starting point was research,” he says, citing extensive first-hand accounts taken from people in Number 10 Downing Street and across key government committees including senior scientists, doctors and nurses countrywide as well as people in care homes.

“Between the first-hand accounts and the minutes from meetings we felt like we were able to get close enough to give people a sense of what was going on. Obviously, it’s a six-hour drama: it’s a massive simplification of what was happening over a period of months. But we tried to keep it as accurate and as detailed as possible.”

And that’s important because Winterbottom wants his series to stand as a chronicle, a testament to the febrile atmosphere and sometimes frenzied response cycle during the early days of the pandemic. He doesn’t see This England as either censure or polemic.

“I was listening to a writer recently talking about how just trying to capture reality is a virtue in itself,” he says. “I personally have no point of view of whether things were done correctly or incorrectly. But then it’s not your usual political story because in the case of the pandemic everyone wants the same thing, which is to control the virus as quickly as possible and minimise its impact.”

He concedes that there will always be a question of “too soon?” when depicting events of this magnitude while the shockwaves are still being felt.

“Of course, there are some problems with doing it right now, with how much perspective you have, but by doing it right now you’ve got more chance of putting it into a narrative form which is as close as you can get to capturing a sense of what it was like. I hope that when people watch it, it reminds them of things that they’d perhaps forgotten. The whole idea of the way the story is told is you know that there were tens of thousands of people having these experiences – and these are just examples. If it has an emotional impact, it comes from that.”

What: This England
When: BBC First and Binge from September 29

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