Kenneth Branagh’s impression of the former coward-in-chief is spot on, but Michael Winterbottom’s Covid drama is leaden, artless and a disservice to all those who died
The voice is spot on. That awful moist, blustering sound – a semi-croak, squeezed out of a tense throat by a man who can never relax because he has no foundations to rely on – is perfect. Close your eyes and Kenneth Branagh could easily be Boris Johnson. The face full of prosthetics is less convincing and becomes a distraction. But that the mask begins to slip the more time you spend in the man’s company may be the metaphor to end all metaphors. If so, it’s one of the more successful elements of Michael Winterbottom’s six-part drama This England (Sky Atlantic), which follows the then prime minister Johnson and his government through the first wave of the pandemic.
It is hampered from the off by feeling both too soon and wildly out of date. This England was in post-production when the Partygate scandal broke and the decision was taken not to try to revise it at such a late stage, when presumably only the most superficial changes could have been made. And of course, Johnson has since been replaced by someone who is shaping up to be – though it hardly seems possible – even worse, albeit in a less showmanish and more stunned-halibut way.
