Supernatural series artistic licence archive#
Supernatural series artistic licence full#

The rapidity with which this was made seems bizarre. How can we 'make sense' of something as senseless as a pandemic? And while we are, as a nation, still coming to terms with the events depicted on screen. It's a laudable aim but on these terms, This England is a failure. Kenneth Branagh suggested: 'Any way of understanding it better is important.' In an interview, Ophelia Lovibond described the project as 'trying to help make sense of a really confusing time through drama'. Some extremely distressing and very realistic scenes of patients in great suffering and dying left me wondering what purpose was served by them. There is a 'disturbing scenes' warning before three of the six episodes and anyone who lost someone in the pandemic should take this seriously. How many scenes of the bewildered elderly residents of nursing homes? How many scenes of exhausted medics on the phone relaying the devastating news of the death of a loved one to the bereaved? How many scenes of people gasping for breath are you comfortable watching? Because there are a lot. And amidst all the drama about the politicians, there are the stories of ordinary people afflicted with the virus and then – more often than not – dying. We move rapidly from Downing Street to a hospital, the Department of Health, a Sage meeting, a care home. Scenes tend to be quite short and there are a huge number of settings and characters. The line evokes Harold Macmillan's supposed response to being asked what a prime minister's greatest challenge is: 'Events, dear boy, events.' And from the off, the Johnson administration is bombarded by events: coronavirus is confirmed in the UK the NHS is buckling under the strain lockdown there's a shortage of personal protective equipment the prime minister is dangerously ill. 'We don't want to be distracted by events,' he says.

Supernatural series artistic licence archive#

We eventually switch from archive footage to Branagh et al on 12 December, 2019, with an exit poll predicting a big Conservative win and an exultant Johnson leaping from his seat.Ĭummings tells Number 10 staff early in the first episode that they will be focusing on long-term strategy. And, of course, the whole thing is a tragedy of much more than Shakespearian proportions, with the national stage eventually metaphorically littered with tens of thousands of bodies.Īctual news footage marches us quickly onwards through Theresa May's resignation the police being called to Carrie Symonds's flat Johnson entering Downing Street.

Supernatural series artistic licence full#

Branagh's Johnson quotes him often and the title of the show is taken from a celebrated speech in Richard II – 'this blessed plot, this Earth, this realm, this England' – the full significance of which becomes apparent at the end of the series.

This is the first instance of the pretty heavy-handed dramatic irony that features regularly in episode one.Īpril 23rd is the date on which Shakespeare's birthday is generally marked and the bard is threaded through this drama. Did Johnson really say this? Did his chief adviser Dominic Cummings (Simon Paisley Day) actually do that? Is this how Carrie Symonds (Ophelia Lovibond), the prime minister's girlfriend, truly felt?Ī date appears on the screen – '23 April 2019' – and we hear an off-screen announcement at an event that the 'very long-awaited biography of Shakespeare by Boris Johnson will finally be published in April 2020'. What is fact and what is fiction? It is a particularly fraught issue when it involves actors playing real, living people.

It opens with the on-screen notice 'This is a fiction based on real events' a tricksy formulation that allows the filmmakers to claim verisimilitude while also exercising a considerable amount of artistic licence. This England is essentially an account of Johnson's first months as prime minister, focusing on his government's handling of the crisis but also interweaving stories relating to the virus's impact on the NHS and nursing homes and vignettes of families losing loved ones. Their responses may be inadequate, their concerns misdirected but, it is made clear, they think they are doing the right thing. The PM, played by Kenneth Branagh, and other members of the government, including the Health Secretary Matt Hancock (Andrew Buchan), are largely depicted as doing their best under very difficult circumstances.

In fact, the biggest surprise about this series is that, ostensibly at least, it does not seek to apportion blame. There was a widespread expectation that This England's co-director and co-writer Michael Winterbottom, whose politics are assumed to be very different to those of the recently departed prime minister, would be letting Johnson have it with both barrels. In a preview of this six-part drama about the first few months of the coronavirus pandemic and the UK government's response to it, one newspaper wondered with regard to Boris Johnson, 'Just how damning a portrayal will this be?'