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You can find the current article at its original source at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/18/julian-assange-nigel-farage-dominic-cummings-benedict-cumberbatch
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| Assange, Farage, Cummings – isn’t it too soon for the Cumberbatch treatment? | Assange, Farage, Cummings – isn’t it too soon for the Cumberbatch treatment? |
| (about 2 months later) | |
| At this time of great political turmoil – Brexit, Trump, endless elections – it can seem like there are few certainties to hold on to. But we can at least take refuge in one unswerving constant, and that is that everything – yes all of it – will soon be portrayed in a Sunday night docudrama starring Benedict Cumberbatch. | At this time of great political turmoil – Brexit, Trump, endless elections – it can seem like there are few certainties to hold on to. But we can at least take refuge in one unswerving constant, and that is that everything – yes all of it – will soon be portrayed in a Sunday night docudrama starring Benedict Cumberbatch. |
| There simply is no getting away from him. There he was as Julian Assange in the Netflix thriller The Fifth Estate, tapping violently into a laptop; here he is tipped to play Nigel Farage in a Hollywood adaptation of Arron Banks’s book The Bad Boys of Brexit (or, as key protagonists would sadly have it, “The Brex Pistols”); and soon, Channel 4 has announced, he will be portraying none other than Vote Leave’s Dominic Cummings in a “Brexit drama”. | There simply is no getting away from him. There he was as Julian Assange in the Netflix thriller The Fifth Estate, tapping violently into a laptop; here he is tipped to play Nigel Farage in a Hollywood adaptation of Arron Banks’s book The Bad Boys of Brexit (or, as key protagonists would sadly have it, “The Brex Pistols”); and soon, Channel 4 has announced, he will be portraying none other than Vote Leave’s Dominic Cummings in a “Brexit drama”. |
| It is already too easy for the media to dwell on the big characters of Westminster and miss what is important | It is already too easy for the media to dwell on the big characters of Westminster and miss what is important |
| Ottery, urgent, Cumberbatch’s chief use in these dramas seems to be adding cheekbones and glamour to the sort of man you ordinarily wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley, much less a well-lit one. This cannot be good for historical accuracy, or indeed anyone’s ego. But then history happens so quickly now. Time was, a decade or so had to pass before a political event became a docudrama. Now that lag is sometimes less than a single year. | Ottery, urgent, Cumberbatch’s chief use in these dramas seems to be adding cheekbones and glamour to the sort of man you ordinarily wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley, much less a well-lit one. This cannot be good for historical accuracy, or indeed anyone’s ego. But then history happens so quickly now. Time was, a decade or so had to pass before a political event became a docudrama. Now that lag is sometimes less than a single year. |
| It’s not just Cumberbatch’s oeuvre. The news of David Blunkett’s affair with Kimberly Quinn broke in 2003. By 2005 the whole thing was detailed in a rollicking drama on Channel 4 – complete with blowjobs, questionable “blindness slapstick”, and a scene where Quinn stuffs a giant teddy into a dustbin and beats it viciously with a spade. | It’s not just Cumberbatch’s oeuvre. The news of David Blunkett’s affair with Kimberly Quinn broke in 2003. By 2005 the whole thing was detailed in a rollicking drama on Channel 4 – complete with blowjobs, questionable “blindness slapstick”, and a scene where Quinn stuffs a giant teddy into a dustbin and beats it viciously with a spade. |
| After the News of the World phone-hacking scandal broke, a play followed uncannily quickly (had the National Theatre, one wonders, been hacking phones themselves?), and a mere year after Theresa May became prime minister, the BBC immortalised it in Theresa v Boris, complete with clunking dialogue and unconvincing lookalikes. There have been the musicals, both Brexit and Corbyn; the Channel 4 dramas – When Boris Met Dave, Miliband of Brothers, Coalition (in which “Prince of Darkness” Peter Mandelson at one point emerges from a cloud of dry ice); and the fringe plays – Boris: World King and Not to Be Seen Outside the EU. | After the News of the World phone-hacking scandal broke, a play followed uncannily quickly (had the National Theatre, one wonders, been hacking phones themselves?), and a mere year after Theresa May became prime minister, the BBC immortalised it in Theresa v Boris, complete with clunking dialogue and unconvincing lookalikes. There have been the musicals, both Brexit and Corbyn; the Channel 4 dramas – When Boris Met Dave, Miliband of Brothers, Coalition (in which “Prince of Darkness” Peter Mandelson at one point emerges from a cloud of dry ice); and the fringe plays – Boris: World King and Not to Be Seen Outside the EU. |
| The theme is always “constipated + mad = British”, and the apex is always a montage of newspaper front pages, accompanied by exclamations on the news that the story has “transfixed the nation”. As if the nation wasn’t capable of being transfixed by the discovery that a word in an audio clip can be heard as either “laurel” or “yanny”, depending on who is listening or at what pitch. | The theme is always “constipated + mad = British”, and the apex is always a montage of newspaper front pages, accompanied by exclamations on the news that the story has “transfixed the nation”. As if the nation wasn’t capable of being transfixed by the discovery that a word in an audio clip can be heard as either “laurel” or “yanny”, depending on who is listening or at what pitch. |
| But handing in history at the first draft stage comes with its own dangers. The BBC’s Theresa v Boris charted the prime minister’s “inevitable” rise, only to be aired just before her dramatic fall. The Fifth Estate, which came out in 2013 when Assange had a very different public profile, now seems far too kind to him – glancing over the sexual assault allegations, and failing to mention his alleged connections to Russia. Joe Twyman, director of the polling organisation Deltapoll, recalls that he was approached by ITV in 2013 to make a “cheerful, everyman” account of his time working for YouGov in Iraq between 2007 and 2010. The drama had fortunately not yet reached airing point when Islamic State started beheading foreigners in 2014. | But handing in history at the first draft stage comes with its own dangers. The BBC’s Theresa v Boris charted the prime minister’s “inevitable” rise, only to be aired just before her dramatic fall. The Fifth Estate, which came out in 2013 when Assange had a very different public profile, now seems far too kind to him – glancing over the sexual assault allegations, and failing to mention his alleged connections to Russia. Joe Twyman, director of the polling organisation Deltapoll, recalls that he was approached by ITV in 2013 to make a “cheerful, everyman” account of his time working for YouGov in Iraq between 2007 and 2010. The drama had fortunately not yet reached airing point when Islamic State started beheading foreigners in 2014. |
| Enfarage: the Movie – will the Bad Boys of Brexit ever make it to the big screen? | Enfarage: the Movie – will the Bad Boys of Brexit ever make it to the big screen? |
| It may indeed be worth waiting a couple of decades before letting the playwrights at it. The BBC has a drama coming up on the trial of politician Jeremy Thorpe – A Very English Scandal, with Hugh Grant – which includes his struggle to keep quiet his relationship with lover Norman Scott at a time when homosexuality was illegal. Had that been dramatised immediately, rather than 40 years later, a rather different story would have been sealed into the public consciousness. | It may indeed be worth waiting a couple of decades before letting the playwrights at it. The BBC has a drama coming up on the trial of politician Jeremy Thorpe – A Very English Scandal, with Hugh Grant – which includes his struggle to keep quiet his relationship with lover Norman Scott at a time when homosexuality was illegal. Had that been dramatised immediately, rather than 40 years later, a rather different story would have been sealed into the public consciousness. |
| And there’s another hazard to dramatising our political class while they are still in office. It is already too easy for the media to dwell on the big characters of Westminster, their hair and their petty feuds, and miss what is important. Perhaps we should tone down the drama. | And there’s another hazard to dramatising our political class while they are still in office. It is already too easy for the media to dwell on the big characters of Westminster, their hair and their petty feuds, and miss what is important. Perhaps we should tone down the drama. |
| • Martha Gill is a freelance political journalist and former lobby correspondent | • Martha Gill is a freelance political journalist and former lobby correspondent |
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