Only one thing really lets down Michael Winterbottom’s methodically damning six-part drama about the government’s response to the Covid crisis: Boris Johnson’s face. Kenneth Branagh perfectly captures the voice and the body language of the then-PM, and convincingly portrays him as lazy, entitled and almost childishly unfit for the role he coveted for so long.
The facial prosthetics are distractingly awful, though, resembling the pallid mask worn by killer Michael Myers in the Halloween films. Johnson’s left eye in particular looks like it’s melting. Then again, perhaps my own vision was affected by the red mist that descended as I watched the first three episodes. The litany of arrogance, incompetence and callousness that Winterbottom, his co-writer Kieron Quirke and co-director Julian Jarrold remind us of stokes a powerful feeling of rage.
Is it too soon to pick at the existential scab of the past 30 months? Quite the opposite. The first few minutes of episode one recap an awful lot of stuff we’re in danger of forgetting. Remember the illegal prorogation of parliament? The way Dominic Cummings abruptly sacked minsters’ trusted aides and hired ‘superforecasters’ with dodgy views on eugenics? The Arcuri affair breaking?
Boris no sooner wins his huge parliamentary majority than he swans off to Mustique with his mistress, prior to divorcing his wife, while much of the country drowns under flash floods. Into this, Winterbottom splices ominous images of bat corpses and Chinese wet markets.
Boris delivers John of Gaunt’s This England speech from Richard II – including the words “this fortress built by Nature for her self against infection” – on Brexit day, shortly after Brits returning from Wuhan are quarantined in Birkenhead. The first episode ends with Boris sheepishly leaving messages for his children – well, some of them – to tell them that dad’s engaged again and there’s a new step-sibling on the way.
In the second episode, the juxtapositions get more jarring. A calendar countdown of headlines between scenes displays the numbers of recorded versus actual cases, the first UK death, and so on. Images of international lockdowns butt up against footage of crowds at the Six Nations Cup, Cheltenham, the Liverpool versus Atletico Madrid football match. In the dramatised scenes, scientists and hospital and care home staff see the crisis looming, while Downing Street frets about focus groups and the illusion of control.
Burbling bits of Shakespeare and Churchillian history, Branagh’s Boris seems a hapless hostage to events and his own inadequacy rather than an outright villain. Much the same goes for Andrew Buchan’s Alan Partridge-esque Matt Hancock, though Winterbottom makes clear that years of Conservative government left the UK woefully unprepared for a pandemic.
The skull-like Cummings (a chilling Simon Paisley Day) and his skinhead henchman Lee Cain (Derek Barr) come across as outright thugs, though, interested only in imposing their own will and agenda. The portrait of Carrie Johnson (Ophelia Lovibond) is pretty harsh too, showing her floating in a bubble of self-regard through the crisis, heedless of propriety, security, or the incontinence of her dog Dilyn.
The dialogue is necessarily sometimes a little on-the-nose (“I’ve been told to shield because of my COPD”), but it’s hard to fault the sheer scale, detail and damning moral thrust of this drama. The third episode shows us bus drivers and care workers being taken ill, the chilling decision to discharge untested patients from hospitals into care homes, and takes us up to the start of the first lockdown.
I couldn’t, in a single sitting, watch on until Cummings’s inexcusable trip to Barnard Castle, because it might have made my head explode. But this is splendid television, history distilled on screen. Watch it and weep.
