James Graham has said in interviews that he regards Gareth Southgate as ‘a hero for the ages’. Even if he hadn’t, though, this view wouldn’t be difficult to detect from Dear England, an adaption of his own stage play.
In this week’s two episodes, Southgate’s unfailing loveliness succeeded in reviving not just the England football team, but also a sense of what England itself essentially is. At one point, he watched the Queen’s Covid address about ‘the attributes of self-discipline, of quiet, good-humoured resolve and of fellow feeling’ that ‘still characterise this country’ – and, as ‘Jerusalem’ swelled on the soundtrack, he clearly believed every word; not surprisingly given that these sentiments underlay everything he did.
If that makes Dear England sound a bit corny, well it sometimes is. But it’s also impossible to resist – as all the best myths are. And mythic the show certainly and unashamedly is, right from the moment of its big, tragic origin story: Southgate’s match-losing penalty miss against Germany in the Euro ’96 semi-finals.
From there, we fast-forwarded to England’s infamous exit from the 2016 Euros at the hands of Iceland (pop: 335,000). So what was to be done? After a brief comic turn from Sam Allardyce, the FA appointed Southgate, then in charge of the under-21s, as an interim manager until they found someone better. Except, of course, that they were never going to.
Having vowed to ‘change the culture’ of English football and banish the kind of fear that had crippled him back in ’96, Southgate (an eerily accurate impersonation by Joseph Fiennes) introduced such FA-baffling ideas as the importance of a shared national story and the need for players to talk about their feelings. To this end, he recruited the psychologist Pippa Grange (Jodie Whittaker), whom he’d approvingly observed urging an audience of business leaders to ‘cultivate an environment where you empower your team to make impactful decisions in the moment’.
In some programmes (WIA, for instance), Pippa’s fondness for this type of language – and her job title as ‘head of people’ – might have been a target of satire. But not here. After some initial scepticism from the players, Pippa’s fear-banishing ways soon did the trick, helped greatly by Southgate’s continuing Ted Lasso levels of impregnable niceness. Before long, his willingness to share his own feelings with the team, including about that missed penalty, ensured that they were expressing their inner lives in special journals and telling each other about traumatic events in their past.
Shortly after that, Southgate morphed into Crawley’s answer to Henry V. First, he inculcated a sense of history by reminding the players they were part of a football story stretching back 150 years. Next, he reminded them of the pride they felt in coming from the parts of England they did; not a land of village greens, but of ‘shit places’ like Wythenshawe and south London: ‘Our shit places, the fans’ shit places – England.’
But naturally Southgate’s patriotism was always of the enlightened sort. In this context, both team and manager taking the knee before games was portrayed as a moving act of solidarity with the black players: performative, perhaps, but performing something fundamentally noble. Again, none of this was subtle. Again, it proved undeniably stirring.
And the same went for these two episodes as a whole (including in the thrilling scenes where England actually played some football). All in all, by endorsing Southgate’s values so whole-heartedly, Dear England is not just a depiction of the power of decency, but a particularly beguiling example of it.
Presenter J.B. Gill went pretty much full Partridge
Meanwhile, if it’s a kinder, gentler Britain you’re after, there’s always Channel 5, which has carved out a successful niche for itself by contentedly accepting that people watching traditional television are unlikely to be young hipsters. Instead, they’ll be middle-aged, middle-England types probably not in the mood for something edgy.
Typical of the channel’s output, to the point of pastiche, was Britain’s Best Service Station. In it, presenter J.B. Gill went pretty much full Partridge (‘Service stations are way of life, part of the DNA of our day trips’) to ponder our supposed love affair with places to stop on the motorway.
As he built up to the big reveal of the nation’s favourite – teasingly signalled about every five minutes – Gill met an array of service-station punters, workers and historians. All exhibited the niceness and unforced belief in national unity of a Southgate, as they traced the evolution of the concrete restaurants of the 1960s to the green spaces, farm shops and huge retail outlets of today.
For the record, Britain’s top three favourites in reverse order are Rugby, Tebay and Gloucester. And if you find yourself either objecting to or agreeing with those choices – as opposed to say, not giving a toss – Channel 5 might just be the place for you.
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