Wednesday 28 September 2022 11:05 PM Shockingly tasteless, a risible script: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS is no fan of new TV ... trends now
THIS ENGLAND
Sky Atlantic
Rating: 
Even theatre titans can have the occasional basic lapse in acting technique. Sir Kenneth Branagh, the greatest Hamlet of his generation, Baftas, Oscars blah-blah etc, has forgotten to remove the coat hanger from his Boris Johnson costume.
He plays the Prime Minister in a jelly-mould fat suit, with his arms thrust out behind him like a duck preparing for takeoff.
As he waddles around Downing Street in This England (Sky Atlantic), his shoulders are rigid, his head is thrust forward. No one has made walking look so awkward since Lurch the butler in The Addams Family.
His ridiculous posture fails to capture any of the bumbling charisma or overgrown schoolboy charm of the real Boris.
It’s a criticism that extends to the whole of this six-part docudrama, which describes itself as ‘a fiction based on real events’.
Boris Johnson (played by Sir Kenneth Branagh) with future wife Carrie (Ophelia Lovibond) when she is pregnant
If this is an attempt to apply the dramatic imagination of The Crown to life in Westminster, it’s an abject disaster.
And if it’s a serious effort to chart the catastrophe of Covid and lockdown on British life, it’s even less successful.
Ricocheting between snapshots of hospitals and research labs, Whitehall backrooms and newspaper offices, This England is a whirl of underwritten scenes held together with tickertape captions that can barely keep up with the changing personnel. These fragments, often lasting just one or two lines of dialogue, are interspersed with shockingly tasteless portraits of the PM’s sex life.
After a blizzard of clips from news reels, the drama begins with his arrival in Downing Street. Legs stiff and elbows back as if he’s been lowered into his suit by a crane, Branagh-as-Boris wobbles through the door of No10.
We hear him, off camera, with future wife Carrie (Ophelia Lovibond). He’s doing his Winston Churchill impression, chuntering ‘Power is an aphrodisiac’, and she’s giggling like a teenager.
Six months later, she’s pregnant and fuming at having to hide from the cameras, kept from public view ‘like the mad woman in the attic’.
When he cancels a night out, she takes her revenge by threatening to withhold sex ‘because you are too weak to tell your children about our baby’ – and slips into an off-the-shoulder party dress so that ‘you can see what you are missing’.
Sir Kenneth Branagh plays the Prime Minister (pictured) in a jelly-mould fat suit, with his arms thrust out behind him like a duck preparing for takeoff
Boris’s non-existent relationship with his children is a constant theme. He leaves voicemails for them at Christmas, reciting their names and the same message for each, and even introducing himself in case they don’t remember who he is.
We appear to glimpse them in one momentary scene – a teenage boy with a blond moptop, watching a speech by his dad on a phone screen until a sister dashes the device out of his hands.
And there are snatches of conversations with divorce lawyers as Boris bickers with hopeless resignation over the
