This England Sky Atlantic
Make Me Prime Minister Channel 4 | All 4
Inside Man BBC One | iPlayer
Industry BBC One | iPlayer
Too soon? It’s arguable that Sky Atlantic’s new six-part pandemic drama This England, from Michael Winterbottom and Kieron Quirke, arrives before we’ve had a chance to process the real thing. Whereas Channel 4’s Help in 2021 focused on care homes, This England is a diligently researched one-stop shop of Covid-19 drama, from the events leading up to the catastrophically delayed first lockdown to England’s grim death toll (more than 112,260) by April 2021.
Boris Johnson is played by Kenneth Branagh with saggy Winnie the Pooh posture and puttyish prosthetic jowls. Simon Paisley Day delivers a satisfyingly ghastly Dominic Cummings, the flint-eyed, superior senior adviser, sloping around in beanie hats like he’s Westminster’s answer to 8 Mile. Elsewhere, there’s Matt Hancock (Andrew Buchan nails his Alan Partridge-esque peacocking), a pregnant Carrie Symonds (Ophelia Lovibond), Rishi Sunak (Shri Patel) and other key players. But no, This England insists, driving the camera into hospital wards, care homes, scientists’ meetings, ordinary British homes full of scared, breathless sufferers – these are the important people, these are the details that matter.
Considering the herculean efforts This England makes to be scrupulous, it feels churlish to note that, with its brisk pace and use of real footage, the show is over-newsy, resembling a hectically unfolding docudrama of set pieces: Wuhan; PPE shortages; clap for carers; cancelled Christmas; vaccines. Tick. Tick. Tick. It’s strongest when it melts away the noise: a care home resident’s distressing last moments are spliced with Cummings casually flouting lockdown rules in Durham to particularly harrowing effect.
Branagh’s Johnson is too kind: his darker character traits are muted, and even when he catches Covid, scenes depicting him writhing in sweaty conscience-stricken delirium, beset by furies, don’t ring true. Elsewhere, he is viewed spouting quotations beside windows – Shakespeare (on whom he is writing a book); Churchill; Sophocles – lost in rapture at his own expensively educated cleverness. (The pandemic as Etonian disaster movie? Discuss.) But you wonder how thick Carrie (or the viewer) is supposed to be when Johnson explains his references: “I’ve got a bit of the old black dog today, as Winston used to call it” is one clunking line. Seriously?
Overall, though overstuffed, This England delivers on sociopolitical rigour and a sense of something beyond pressurised ineptitude: a hideous inbuilt flippancy towards other people’s lives. You also get a sense of Johnson the deeply flawed man, the chaotic paterfamilias, the inveterate hustler (“We need the spondoolicks”): the status junkie who treats Chequers like the only staycation worth taking. However, with stakes so high, and with the pandemic now a dramatic genre in its own right, a pottering, dufferish Johnson feels like a cop out.
Channel 4’s Make Me Prime Minister is basically The Apprentice for politicos. Over six weeks, “12 ordinary people” compete to become the alternative prime minister. One of them is Jackie Weaver (of Handforth council “You have no authority here” fame); another is musician Goldie’s son, and so on.
Alastair Campbell, described as “Tony Blair’s rottweiler”, and former co-chair of the Conservative party, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, oversee challenges; the first theme is education. Unlike The Apprentice, where people desperately avoid being made the first project manager, two volunteers come forward (although Weaver wisely keeps her powder dry). Darius (a Tory wannabe who fled Afghanistan with his family) suggests outdoor lessons; Natalie, a medical communications director, proposes vocational pursuits.
After candidates present their policy ideas to the media and a public debate, the loser is turfed out of the make-believe corridors of power, having first been given the chance to honourably resign (as with their real-life counterparts, some hope!). Could any of these people end up as elected politicians, ponder Campbell and Warsi, with carefully straight faces. This is cringe TV with a concept you could drive the Brexit bus through. As with The Apprentice, the fun is in the over-reaching contestants; their delusions of untapped greatness.
I end up bewildered by the first two episodes of Steven Moffat’s four-part thriller Inside Man (BBC One). On paper it sounds good. Stanley Tucci plays Grieff, a professor of criminology who killed his wife. He now resides on death row with a sidekick (Atkins Estimond), solving Sherlock-style riddles for outsiders.
In the UK, meanwhile, journalist Beth (Lydia West) is harassed by a lout on a crowded train, (rather quickly) handing him her phone before fellow passenger Janice (Dolly Wells) comes to her aid. Janice (spoiler alert) then discovers child sexual abuse images on the USB stick of a teenager she’s tutoring, the son of vicar Harry (David Tennant). Instead of explaining that the porn belongs to a man from church, Harry says it’s his and imprisons Janice in the family cellar.
Perhaps revelations are to come, because taking the rap for someone else’s child porn seems pretty extreme. Similarly, Beth consulting Grieff about Janice’s disappearance feels like two storylines crudely bolted together. While Grieff’s riddle-solving set pieces are overworked, Tucci saves Inside Man. It’s yet another Hannibal Lecter-esque, “erudite psychopath” role, but Tucci lends it spray-starched elegance and Moffat gifts him nicely honed lines: “Everyone’s a murderer… all it takes is a good reason and a bad day.” I’ll hang on to see how Janice escapes from the cellar, but the plot is hobbled by implausibility.
Industry (BBC One), Mickey Down and Konrad Kay’s whip-smart parable of youth, ambition and fragility in London’s finance sector, returns for a second series. There’s the Pierpoint gang, including scabrous mentor Eric (Ken Leung); poor little rich girl turned uber-shark Yas (Marisa Abela); Rob (Harry Lawtey), the oik Adonis with sexual dysfunction; and Harper (Myha’la Herrold), struggling to recover after having her soul sucked out in series one.
Industry remains ludicrously overstylised and at times verges on daft. People have sex like they’re showing off in a Cardi B video and snarl lines such as: “Do you want a guided tour of your irrelevancy for me?” But for all the nihilistic posturing, there’s a streamlined grace and cleverness to it. If you haven’t yet had the (guilty) pleasure, I recommend you catch up.
Star ratings (out of five)
This England ★★★
Make Me Prime Minister ★★★
Inside Man ★★
Industry ★★★
What else I’m watching
Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story
Netflix
This new Ryan Murphy drama about the American serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer is genuinely dark and grim, even by the standards of the genre. Evan Peters is brilliant in the central role.
Sensationalists: The Bad Girls and Boys of British Art
BBC Two
It has been 25 years since the emergence of the Young British Artists, among them Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst. This docuseries also examines the role played by art schools, raves, squats and dole queues.
The Old Man
Disney+
John Lithgow stars as an FBI agent tasked with tracking down a CIA absconder (Jeff Bridges) in this spy thriller with a difference, which carries the added poignancy of Bridges’s real-life health problems.
