Writer: James Graham
Directors: Rupert Goold and Paul Whittington
It begins as it does on stage with Gareth Southgate’s penalty miss from 1996, here using the real footage before cutting to the older wiser Southgate in 2016 morphed into Joseph Fiennes reprising his National Theatre and West End performance as the England manager who used radical new techniques to build an England team that could perform at the highest level. Now imagined as a four-part series, adding an hour to the original play, James Graham’s exploration of English identity through football, Dear England arrives on another big British institution. the BBC. Tasked with instigating a period of calm but knowing change is needed, the first two episodes prove essential state-of-the-nation viewing.
Episode One, in the hands of original director Rupert Goold, deals with much of the play’s first Act, taking Gareth from a caretaker position to permanent England Manager and the newly formed squad from eleven separate entities all terrified to be playing for a team likely to be savaged by fans and the media, to a highly functioning unit capable of winning their first ever World Cup penalty shootout in 2018. Like the play, some time is spent in this first hour sneering at and then examining Southgate’s approach, bringing in psychologist Pippa Grange (Jodie Whittacker) to work on team cohesion as well as instituting a series of measures including a bootcamp to get the players working together. “Come fix England with me” he tells her, a trademark double meaning in Graham’s work as fear of change, fear of losing the past, fear of accepting the present haunt English football and the nation.
It proves gripping stuff, relocating some of the dressing room and canteen scenes to a weekend of marine training as Gareth encourages players from different clubs to work together and, crucially, share his own World Cup story – one of the key moments in all version of Dear England that underscores the characterisation of Southgate himself – a moving monologue about the loneliness and burden of his 1996 moment, but one that inspires him to help this younger generation of players overcoming the doubters who crowd in at the start of Episode One. Almost entirely rewritten and expanded for television, this is classy stuff from the BBC with a stunning central performance from Fiennes, helping to shake off its theatrical origins to become its own entity.
Episode Two rejoins the team at the 2018 World Cup which they lose, and Paul Whittington takes over direction, a reminder that Southgate and Graham’s plan is to tell a longer story, building to the Qatar World Cup in a later episode. Fast forwarding to 2020-21, it’s the pandemic and England is hosting the Euros, with mounting pressure to accelerate Southgate’s improvement timetable, a new element of jeopardy to motor this second act. This becomes a much more ruthless episode as winning at Wembley moves up the agenda, jettisoning players to replacing them with new faces more likely to win, and most crucially a betrayal, a break with Pippa that will prove decisive.
One of the key aspects of this story is the scepticism that continues to haunt Southgate’s methods, with those outside the dressing room still keen to get to the winning third act, but Dear England looks at the casualties this leaves behind, the stress, family pressures, racist abuse and hurt affecting the players who are dropped as well as the ones who remain in pursuit of a kinder, more understanding approach to national sport and national feeling as they grapple with what England means today. And as a result, Southgate’s famous letter is penned.
For those who know the play well, scenarios, lines, jokes and plenty of original cast members make the transfer to this excellent BBC adaptation including several members of the squad and backroom staff, and it’s nice to see these young actors being given the same opportunity as their footballing alter egos to perform their craft at the highest level on a May bank holiday weekend. New members join the cast too from other Graham projects including David Shields who led Punch. So far, with episodes augmented with footage from matches and commentary that BBC already own, this feels as authentic as it can be although the political context which struggled on stage also feels a little heavy here. With so much hope, fear and expectation riding on Dear England’s transfer to the BBC, the story so far seems to have a winning formula. With two more episodes to come, can it, like Southgate, go all the way?
Episodes 1 and 2 of Dear England are available on the BBC iPlayer now.
