Russell T Davies's new drama encapsulates all that's wrong with the box-ticking BBC
For over thirty years Russell T. Davies has been one of Britain’s best TV writers. He is an extraordinary talent. His breakthrough work was Queer as Folk (Channel 4, 1999-2000) and his brilliant revival of Doctor Who took him into the mainstream. A Very English Scandal (BBC1, 2018), with Hugh Grant as Jeremy Thorpe and Ben Whishaw as Norman Scott, was outstanding, and deservedly won four BAFTA awards and was nominated for eight more.
So, it’s hardly surprising that excitement was off the scale when it was announced that BBC1 would be showing a new drama series by Davies, Years and Years , a dystopian look at Britain’s future.
It has a terrific cast, including Emma Thompson, Rory Kinnear, Anne Reid and Russell Tovey. Simon Cellan Jones is directing and it’s got money from HBO and Canal+,Dysp as well as the BBC. The reviews are effusive: “ drama with a beating heart that thinks big urgent thoughts” ( Daily Telegraph ); “bold and brilliant” ( The New Statesman ); “glorious” and “thrilling” ( The Guardian ).
None of this is remotely surprising. The state of TV criticism has been dire for years and give our press trendy lefty fare and they will roll over in delight like a small puppy.
Which brings us to the big problem with Years and Years: it’s a classic BBC view of Britain. The central characters include three gays, one black woman, a half-Chinese boy, a Ukrainian refugee and a young woman in a wheelchair. Except for one grandmother, mocked by the others for being old and out of touch, no one is over sixty. There obviously won’t be any old people in Britain in the future.
Everyone’s trendy and middle class and has the right kind of Guardianista political views, especially about the Emma Thompson character, a populist right-wing politician (Vivienne Rook), who says shocking things like “I don’t give a fuck about the Palestinians”, so she’s obviously the most evil character to hit the screen since Cruella De Vil – and is bound to get her comeuppance.
What is perhaps most surprising is the total lack of originality when it comes to predicting a future Britain. More refugees? Of course. Trump’s still president? Sure. He launches a nuclear attack on China? Absolutely. One character (only one) has a robot and even has sex with it (shock, horror). But he’s a white male so what do you expect? A teenage daughter announces to her liberal parents that she’s Trans. (There, at least, there is a clever twist: not trans-sexual, she means trans-human. She’s going to download herself. “I will be data”.)
Davies’s vision of a futuristic Britain could not be more predictable or less shocking. And this brings us to a larger issue. This isn’t just about Davies. The problem with left-wing BBC drama is it’s so conventional. That’s why the liberal-left press love it. They share exactly the same vision of Britain. “Glorious” and “thrilling”. Of course.
What would be interesting, “thrilling” even, would be if the BBC commissioned a state of the nation drama from a right-wing writer (are there any?) with a really different vision of Britain, something which would have Polly Toynbee ranting into her muesli. It won’t happen, of course. Not ever. In the meantime, we’ll just have to make do with robots having sex. Doctor Who was a thousand times more original.
