This blog was written on Sunday Jan 13, 2019
I don’t know how many of you saw last Monday’s Channel 4 drama: Brexit, The Uncivil War. I will leave it for others to judge its merits as a drama, and for good reason too.
I am, sadly,one of those curious individual who genuinely enjoy the dublinese patois of Mrs Brown’s Boys. This tells you all you need to know about my artistic judgement – and so goes any “street cred” I have managed to build up over recent years.
Then again, I am originally from Dublin so maybe it’s just the dublinese calling out to me, like Colin Farrell’s opening lines in the great In Bruges. But a Dubliner, is a Dubliner is a Dubliner. Once and for always.
However, I do know about politics and, unfortunately, too much about Brexit – so, as I see it, when it came to attempting to explain Brexit and why the UK voted for it The Uncivil War fell well short of the mark.
The nearest it came to the actual raw and ugly politics of Brexit was the focus-group scene which, as the playwright Sarah Helm noted in the Guardian, better portrayed …how the poison of Brexit has set ordinary people against each other, or exposed how easily our feeble leaders were led by opportunistic apparatchiks… than any newspaper article