Writer: James Graham
Director: Paul Whittington
When we left the England football team at the end of Episode 2, Jospeh Fiennes’ Gareth Southgate had coached them to their first successful penalty shootout in a World Cup competition and a route to the final where the pressure got to them. But with so much expectation to win and the departure of psychologist Pippa Grange, Southgate derails their three act story to try to bring a win forward as soon as possible. With a large part of James Graham’s two act play used up in the first two episodes, the final two offer newer content that takes the story up to 2024 with Southgate’s eventual resignation.
At the beginning of Episode Three, it’s back to 1996 and the penalty miss that still haunts the contemporary version of Southgate. But here in new material for the BBC, Graham imagines a brief conversation between Gareth and John Major (Stephen Mackintosh) in the immediate aftermath of the miss and a classic Graham trick of bringing politics and popular culture together with a moment of admiration for the two quiet men who became revered leaders and time passed as history treated them more kindly. The cut to England’s exit from the 2021 Euros after a similar penalty misses and an outpouring of fan violence and racism sets the jeopardy for an hour of television that puts the ethos of Southgate’s Dear England letter under a scrutiny while his decent approach looks like a failure.
One of the key stories in this adaptation is how stories – Southgate’s and the other players, even the nation’s – could have been different if the ball had travelled a few inches to one side or the other, offering a victory instead of loss, so as Gareth despairs ‘Why can’t we just win” (another typical double meaning) the weight of that inevitable narrative trajectory hangs heavy on the character with time almost up in the three acts he promised, . There are more half thoughts in this episode that worked better on stage as a montage such as the women’s football team win in 2022, new faces in football leadership, new Prime Ministers, more new material with the pre-Qatar loss against Hungary but the context becomes so big that the drama can only skim the surface of the ‘noise’ around the male players as the psychological pressure becomes too much. It shows all the failed England Managers of recent history but in moving beyond the material of the play to fill 4 hours of television, it makes the episode feel scattered.
Episode Four is much more successful as Graham’s narrative and Southgate’s three act tragedy gets back on track with the material added to the play when it returned to the National Theatre in 2025 taking in the Euros competition in Germany the previous year. Having spent most of the last hour getting in his own head, Southgate and England have renewed purpose in this finale segment. And here we go back to the essential argument that has dogged Southgate’s approach from the start; does he pick the best talent or form a squad that will get along and perform as a unit, and it is here in this concluding chapter that Southgate compromises his vision again for that elusive last chance to win, leading to another ruthless series of deselection conversations. “There’s nothing left to do now but win” Fiennes’ England Manager mournfully acknowledges but as one commentator asks “how many times can your heart break?”
And in Fiennes’ performance at the end of this long journey it is clear the fight gone from this Southgate entirely before the players even step on the coach, and for the first time in the series the sense of hope, the direction for Graham’s version of the England team seems broken. Looking back across the four episodes its hard not to see that Southgate’s decision to abandon his psychological approach in favour of just trying to win brings the whole lot crumbling down, and the ruins are explored movingly in this last section despite a final act surge. If you’re a football fan this has probably been an illuminating if painful watch, reliving the rising hope that turned to loss yet again. If you don’t like the game, this has been a cracking tragedy, and while Southgate’s story may be over and England may be in extra time as a squad and a nation, it marches on.
All episodes of Dear England are available on the BBC iPlayer now.
