James Graham’s output makes your head spin. More than 30 plays in the past 18 years, three TV dramas, a few films, oh, and a Broadway musical or two. There was the break-out hit This House. The lid-lifting Rupert Murdoch tale Ink. The “did he cheat?” “coughing major” drama Quiz. The Olivier-winning comedy Labour of Love. His enthralling study of media and politics Best of Enemies. This year, he’s had two plays on already: Punch, about a one-punch killing, and Boys from the Blackstuff, an adaptation of Alan Bleasdale’s agenda-setting 1982 unemployment drama. In autumn, his Nottingham-set series Sherwood is returning to BBC One. In the days after we meet, he’s flying to Germany to watch England compete in the Euros as research for Dear England, his football play (another Olivier winner) that he’s bringing back to the stage and adapting for television. Phew. Somehow, in the middle of all of this, I snatch an hour with him, aptly, in one of London’s busiest places: Piccadilly Circus. He seems to be everywhere, all at once. But his state-of-the-nation dramas are always so even-handed, so undidactic, that I’m left wondering: who is James Graham? What makes him cry? What makes him angry…?
“Oh, I get angry all the time,” the 41-year-old says, sipping on a pint of coke and looking miraculously untired with a fresh, open face. A crisp blue shirt encases a svelte frame. “The desire to be even comes from humility – I know there must be contradictions or kinks in my logic that I don’t see, that maybe the other side do. And it’s a genuine thrill for me to be devil’s advocate and go, ‘Imagine that Dominic Cummings [who he examined in the TV film Brexit: The Uncivil War] was completely right about the European Union – what are his best arguments?’, or, ‘I think the benefit that Rupert Murdoch had on the newspaper industry is dot dot dot…’ I find myself going down some dark holes with that.”
