With an ego as gargantuan as his obviously is, it must be highly flattering to Boris Johnson that no less a figure than Sir Kenneth Branagh was chosen to play him in This England, Sky’s new drama about the now former PM and the Covid crisis. More, still, that considerable time and energy has been spent on turning Branagh into a passable physical replica of Johnson.
A frequent problem in dramatisations such as these (think The Crown, A Very English Scandal, Darkest Hour) is whether the main players should basically be doing impressions of a well-known real-life figure, or rather play them more as they might a fictional figure, say Hamlet or Mr Darcy. In the case of This England, they’ve opted for the impersonations, with some uncanny likenesses. As Matt Hancock, Andrew Buchan reproduces every tiny intonation and mannerism of the hapless former health secretary so unnervingly well that it is as if they’d actually got Hancock on set and applied prosthetics to make him, Hancock, look like Buchan. (Hancock’s love affair is ignored, by the way, which is probably just as well.)
