Frighteningly close to reality: alongside Boris Johnson and his staff, "This England" takes us once again to the brink of the Corona crisis.
Some will look back with horror at the past few years on the occasion of the just ousted English Prime Minister Boris Johnson and not highlight Brexit and Covid as the only disaster for the island state. In fact, however, the five-part factual series by Michael Winterbottom and Julian Jarrold is less a reckoning with the political clown from Downing Street and his "Partygate" than a reappraisal of what happened during the first pandemic wave, which hit England particularly hard. Of course, Johnson, his family and his staff are still very much in the spotlight. This is especially true because the British prime minister himself contracted covid at a comparatively early (and severe) age. With his decisions, he has steered the country through a crisis that has had Shakespearean proportions. So which thespian would be a better fit to embody Boris Johnson than Shakespeare alumni Kenneth Branagh?