“When people say that something is too soon to be a TV drama, I both respect it, but completely reject it.”
Those are the words of Dear England writer James Graham, speaking with us as our latest guest for The Radio Times Writers’ Room.
He was responding to the suggestion that a drama depicting real events can arrive ‘too soon’ after they take place – something that has been levelled at him before, particularly surrounding his dramatisation of Dominic Cummings’s hand in the Brexit referendum.
Brexit: The Uncivil War, a Channel 4 drama starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Cummings, was released in 2019, just three years after Britain voted to leave the European Union. The accusation that the drama was jumping the gun by not waiting for history to settle or further events to take their course is one Graham says he finds “quite frustrating”.
“What I think that implies in the premise is that drama, TV, theatre, music, film is secondary to journalism or blogs or commentary or pundits on political shows,” Graham says. “Why? When actually, if I was being really pretentious, it was the theatre and drama that came first, two and a half thousand years ago.
“Theatre was the first time that tribes came together in ancient Greece, and then out of that condition came democracy, came journalism, came academia, but it was storytelling that came first. That’s how we made sense of the world. In fact, democracy was just a story we told ourselves, and then made it into a real thing.
“So, the idea that in moments of national crisis, like the divisions that were caused by the Brexit referendum, that drama should take a back seat and wait for the story to be over – in the meantime, any journalist or any political commentator can write whatever they want – I find that really unhelpful, patronising and not in the spirit of what drama is meant to be.
“It’s not just entertainment, it’s not just distraction, it is how we make sense of the world. And so I understood that Brexit was a story that was ongoing, and that we had to be really careful, but I really believe that we deserved at that point, two years on, a story to begin contributing.”
Graham continued: “The thing I wheeled out as my defence often – and I did have to defend myself quite a lot from some surprising quarters, actually, often quite liberal or progressive quarters – our gap between broadcasting Brexit: The Uncivil War with Benedict Cumberbatch and the referendum vote was the exact same gap between the Watergate scandal and All the President’s Men, which was that incredible film with Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford trying to make sense of a national trauma about two and a half years after it happened.
“No one looks at All the President’s Men and goes ‘How irresponsible. How outrageous!’ So that was my defence. I understand it. I’m not an idiot. I understand why people go, ‘This is so controversial, why are you adding controversy to it?’ But that to me is not what drama does. It’s actually adds empathy, nuance, illumination and understanding.”
Graham continues: “Other writers, other painters, other musicians, other ballet choreographers throughout the next 100 years can do their own version of Brexit and try and make sense of it through that art form. Mine didn’t have to be any definitive anything.
“I do understand that was a character, Dominic Cummings, played by Benedict, that provokes a lot of emotions and reactions in people. He’s not an uncontroversial figure. And to what extent do you have to be careful that you don’t mythologise or overly humanise or overly demonise these people? But yeah, I reject the basic premise of that argument.”
Graham’s latest series, the BBC’s Dear England, is also coming fairly soon after the events it portrays, with the drama leading right up to 2024.
The series is a four-part adaptation of Graham’s play of the same name, which focuses on Gareth Southgate’s tenure as manager of the England football team, and how he turned around their fortunes by completely changing the ethos of the squad.
This involved bringing in a psychologist, Pippa Grange, played by Jodie Whittaker, who acted as the Football Association’s Head of People and Team Development from 2017 to 2019.
Joseph Fiennes reprises his role as Southgate after originating it at the National Theatre. Of course, telling this story on screen is very different than on the stage, with Graham noting that “there wasn’t a single football on stage in the play, it was imagined”.
Meanwhile, he says “basically all the material in the final episode – which we describe as Gareth arriving at Mordor, his Mordor, which is Germany, the side that he missed his penalty against in 96 – that’s all new material”.
“That was great to spend time in,” he says, “because I feel like thankfully, the universe did deliver me a really climactic, really meaty ending of this story.”
It’s just the latest project that Graham, who was worked most consistently as a playwright since 2005, has adapted from one of his own stage productions. Previously, he brought Quiz to ITV, while he is also working on a film adaptation of Ink with Danny Boyle, which stars Jack O’Connell as newspaper editor Larry Lamb and Guy Pearce as Rupert Murdoch.
Graham spoke to us about all of these projects in his chat for The Radio Times Writers’ Room, as well as his work on one-off drama Caught in a Trap, a crucial episode of The Crown and Sherwood, his only returning series to date.
On Sherwood, he teased that the upcoming third season would introduce a “brand new family that I put through a brand new trauma, and we really put these guys through the wringer”.
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You can watch the full video at the top of this article right now, and look out for more trips to The Radio Times Writers’ Room soon.
In the meantime, you can catch up with our previous chats with Mark Gatiss, Harry and Jack Williams, Noah Hawley, Neil Cross, Steven Knight, Chris Chibnall, Jack Thorne, Sarah Quintrell, Stefan Golaszewski and Richard Gadd.
Dear England will begin on BBC One and iPlayer at 9pm on Sunday 24 May 2026.
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