Do you remember the coronavirus pandemic? Chances are you do, firstly because it happened very recently (and is ongoing, according to the opinion of some scientists) and secondly because it was very, very horrible. The collective trauma of the event was unprecedented since the Second World War. With that in mind, here comes the show that precisely nobody was asking for: This England. Dominic Cummings yelling about Brexit! Dramatisations of people dying in the ICU!! Kenneth Branagh as Boris Johnson!!!
For all that This England (Sky Atlantic) sets out to be a panoptic view of the early months of the crisis, there’s a blonde tousled elephant in the room. Even if unintentional, the show is all about Boris Johnson, and the great problem with Branagh’s performance is that it’s simultaneously a fairly poor impression and an enormously distracting one. He paces and preens (not helped by a script that gives him lines like, “power is an aphrodisiac and absolute power is absolutely aphrodisiacal”) and the audience is constantly reminded that this is supposed to be BORIS JOHNSON. Scarcely a scene goes by without him trotting out a gobbet of Elizabethan poetry or Greek verse; it is characterisation with all the depth of a Wikipedia sub-category.
