This England

The show is keen to point out its fiction based on facts, however, the scenes in the care homes and hospitals are trully heart breaking. The country was clearly unprepared for c19. The actors in the care homes portray the tragedy with care and perfection. We had daily figures from the government during the pandemic, but the stories portrayed in the programme really bring home the individual tragedy and devastating stories happening all accross their country, personal stories behind the figures.

A great, and deeply thought provoking programme. The acting all round was brilliant, in particular the elderly patients who succumbed to the awful disease.

Branagh as Johnson is fantastic, after 15 minutes in you forget you are not watching the real Boris. The pace and style of the series reminds me of 2011's Contagion. The music and sound design leaves me with a continuous feeling of tension hanging in the air. The hospital scenes looks authentic, you can clearly see how misled and thus desperate the medical personnel is at times. The whole series takes you back to those days back in February and March 2020 when the whole world came to a standstill. And when noone knew when, or if this pandemic will ever be over again. A must-watch with great acting!

This series is so raw it's hard to watch at times. I had to pinch myself that only 18 months ago we were in lockdown, stuck at home, despairing at panic buying and praying for a vaccine. This dramatization is extremely well acted, all the main players are well represented, and there is a superb portrayal of the behind-the-scenes pandemonium as the pandemic progresses. The episodes covering Care Homes are especially harrowing, as is the sense of despair in the NHS. The flaw I think is that we learn very little of the virus itself, the molecular biology, the cause, how it spread, vaccine development etc. Instead the focus is on suffering, loss and political ineptitude. So it's part of the picture but not all of it.

There is so many takeaways from this, but the stand out is the realisation that Dominic Cummings is just not very bright. In fact, I'd suggest that he is a bit of a twonk.

More generally, this is well done - it is well written, well performed, maintains a decent pace, covers the key moments of the pandemic in way that is very easy to follow. Dramatically, it generally delivers.

However, whilst Branagh, as Boris, captures the voice, the prosthetics are a problem. Winterbottom, et al, would have done well to consider Anthony Hopkins' performance as Nixon. Whilst they look nothing alike, Hopkins captured the physically of Nixon very well and built the performance up from that. I suspect that the prosthetics were an impediment and, sometimes, the physical performance, the hunch of the shoulders, the wave of the hands, the shake of the head, comes too close to parody to quite work.

The dream sequences, just to cement that Boris is a bad Dad, detracted. It was off point, added nothing, it should have been cut.

Finally, Contagion. In the first or second episode, Carrie and Boris are sat watching TV and there we find Kate Winslet explaining the reproductive properties of an imaginary virus, which just served to remind me how much better Soderbergh delivered all of this. Where this was baggy - multiple characters introduced, just to kill them off - Contagion was rigorous, tight, taut, and all the better for it. I understand what Winterbottom was trying to do: to give the hidden victims a voice - but, ultimately, Contagion delivered a greater punch through maintaining focus.

Oh, and some of those politicians - Hancock, and the like - really do belong in prison. That Tory Government really is stained in blood.

I was really looking forward to this, but my only criticism is that it didn't really know what it was trying to do.

It's a tough job to cover everything that happened because there was simply too much going on to fit into the time allowed, but no mention of Track&Trace and the PPE scandals was very odd to say the least.

Some judicious editing would have made this more engaging because we don't learn much from continually watching people walking around and saying hello to their colleagues.

All the bits about the dog (Dylan) should never have made it to the final cut.

6/10 because it's above average but nowhere near as insightful as it could have been.