Kenneth Branagh as Boris Johnson in Michael Winterbottoms’ timely drama series

In this first episode in particular, he says, it feels like things are happening far away, far away in China or a little closer in Japan or Italy. So, by using the archives, you see them remotely; it’s not personal.

The title of the six-part series is taken from the famous speech by John of Gaunts in Shakespeares Richard II. Taken out of context, it is often quoted as a hymn to the majesty of England: This other Eden, half-paradise / This fortress built by nature for herself

But actually, John of Gaunt highlights how things went wrong in Scepter Island. The Winterbottoms series also asks what went wrong in an island nation where 178,000 people have died to date, but the government to this day insists it has answered the big calls.

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

Undoubtedly part of the original call of This England is the sight of Sir Kenneth Branagh in his Boris Johnson wig spilled spaghetti bowl. It’s as much a study of the man at the helm (and Branagh’s transformation is disturbingly strange) as it is of the ramifications of his legislative process.

No matter how big your job (being prime minister), how bad the situation is (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, that period coincided with the fact that he had just spent six exhausting months to come to power and then win a general election; but also in his personal life, moving in with his girlfriend [Carrie Johnson, played by Ophelia Lovibond]getting her pregnant, divorcing his wife, having a baby So the fact that all of this was happening in parallel with COVID, it felt like it was important to incorporate it.

But involving personal lives and private meetings opens Winterbottom to the charge of invention of authorship. How much of this actually happened?

It says at the start of each episode that it’s fiction based on real events, so it’s not like it’s verbatim accounts. Obviously the starting point was research, he says, citing numerous first-hand accounts gathered from people at Number 10 Downing Street and key government committees, including top scientists, doctors and nurses. across the country as well as people in care homes.

Between the first-hand accounts and meeting minutes, we felt like we could get close enough to give people an idea of ​​what was going on. Obviously, it’s a six-hour drama: it’s a massive oversimplification of what was happening over a period of months. But we tried to keep it as accurate and as detailed as possible.

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And that’s important because Winterbottom wants his series to feel like a chronicle, a testament to the feverish atmosphere and sometimes frenetic response cycle of the early days of the pandemic. He does not see This England as censorship or controversy.

I was listening to a writer recently talk about how just trying to capture reality is a virtue in itself, he says. Personally, I have no view on whether things were done right or wrong. But this is 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 minimize its impact.

He concedes that it will always be a question of too soon? when depicting events of this magnitude while the shock waves are still being felt.

Of course there are some issues with doing it now, with the perspective you have, but by doing it now you’re more likely to put it in a narrative form that comes as close as possible to capturing a feeling of how it was. I hope when people watch it it will remind them of things they might have forgotten. The idea of ​​how the story is told is that you know there were tens of thousands of people who had these experiences and these are just examples. If it has an emotional impact, it comes from there.

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

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