Dear England

With the worst team track record for penalties in the world when he takes over as manager, Gareth Southgate knows he needs to open his mind and face up to the years of hurt to take England back to the promised land.

The country that gave the world football has delivered a painful pattern of loss. Why can’t the England team win at their own game?

Dear England comes to BBC iPlayer and BBC One from Sunday 24 May with episodes three and four arriving on Sunday 31 May. You can watch the drama on BBC One on Sunday and Monday nights.

• Watch Dear England on BBC iPlayer

Writer James Graham introduces the drama below, including an in-depth interview we filmed with him where he shares some great writing advice.

What made you want to adapt your play Dear England into a drama on the BBC?

I always hoped there might be a screen life to Dear England, which would allow us to get inside the heads of the characters with a more intimate quality compared to the epic theatricality of the stage play. It's been incredibly exciting to translate the story and the backstage world of the England men's football team into television.

There’s a huge reach to TV dramas too – this is a national side, it was shown at the National Theatre and it’s now going to be on our national broadcaster, the BBC, where the whole nation can access it.

I’m a big believer that stories like this should be for everybody and while theatre is great for packing people into a space, there are barriers to that, so the opportunity to put Dear England on TV made me feel excited to talk about these themes on a popular level. 

Rupert Goold, Joseph Fiennes and a number of other actors from the stage show are involved in the TV version. What has it been like to have that continuity from stage to screen?

It was really delightful to continue the creative relationships that we built during the stage play. I basically built this show from the ground up with the director, Rupert Goold.

We found this story together and so for him to build this show with me for screen, with all the learning that we’ve done - and welcome new people and talent, such as our director for episodes two to four, Paul Whittington, whose work I’ve long admired - has been great.

We tried to maintain the scale, the themes, the euphoria, the theatricality and the poetry of the stage play, while making this work as four hours of television, with the realism that naturally happens on-screen.

In terms of your research, did anything change when you moved over to writing scripts for TV?

What’s great about adapting Dear England from stage is that a lot of people came to see the stage play who are involved in that world – we had a lot of legacy football players, people from the FA, and journalists. What’s great is that, when you continue the life of a story in a different medium, the people who have seen it want to talk to you about it, to share their experiences and new information.

It’s so useful from a research point of view. We had a fantastic six-month period where we were researching and I was meeting players and commentators and people at the top of their game who could help expand on our knowledge, which helped to create new scenes, ideas and perspectives for the TV version.

And of course, the 'story' kept going after the play. The original play ended at the 2022 Qatar World Cup, which was Gareth's third tournament as manager. He had a fourth tournament left in him, which becomes our fourth episode in the TV series. I got to travel to Germany and be amongst the 2024 Euros with the Football Association, who let me be in that world a little.

I had never been to an international tournament before, so to be in a stadium watching those games with the best players in the world and to feel the atmosphere, both when it goes right and when it goes wrong, and to make sense of it on the ground was really useful. I was watching my fourth episode happen around me - it was quite bizarre!

Were there any specific ideas that came about through adapting this story for the screen? 

There’s one moment that I wrote quite early on that doesn’t exist on stage, because with television you have more permission to move around compared to the linear journey of a stage play. It’s where we get to go back in time to 1996 with the young Gareth Southgate, which we never quite found a way to put on stage.

After the young Gareth missed his famous penalty in 1996, he goes backstage of Wembley stadium and sits on his own briefly and happens to bump into the Prime Minister, John Major, who was on his way out – both out of the stadium and out of public life. Here were two men unlikely to ever have been at the top of their game who found themselves there.

Gareth found himself as a defender taking one of the most important penalties in English footballing history and failing. On the other hand, there was a Prime Minister who followed Margaret Thatcher and was called ‘The Grey Man’ who no-one ever expected anything of. 

That moment lets us imagine two unlikely people talking softly, quietly and painfully against the backdrop of something huge and epic. It's private, intimate and surprising.

How did you approach writing characters like Gareth Southgate and Harry Kane who are not just real people, but incredibly well-known?

In Dear England, we’re dealing with well-known public figures, and it feels like we do know their stories, their behaviours, their mannerisms, their biographies, their family life. You feel a bit presumptuous putting the England captain, Harry Kane, on screen or legacy figures like Gary Lineker and Paul Gascoigne.

We all share an understanding or perception of these people. My rule when I’m writing real life people is that you have a responsibility to try and represent them fairly, and I take that really seriously. I try to get to know them as much as possible – I got to spend time with Gareth during this process, which was a real privilege.

At some point, they also have to perform the function of a character in a drama. Whether it’s Harry Kane or Othello, they have a role in terms of what they want, their obstacles, their objectives - what do they learn, how do they change, what are their strengths and weaknesses?

It’s great to have this existing biography, you’re not making them up from scratch, but eventually you have to liberate yourself a little bit and I think an audience understands that and recognises that I wasn’t there in the dressing room at half time when we were losing to Slovakia in Germany 2024. Once they leave the pitch, the characters become mine and I’m doing my best to present what I think may have happened and what conversations may have occurred in these private moments.

The title ‘Dear England’ is from Gareth Southgate’s letter to the nation. What message did you want to bring from that letter into this series?  

The title of Dear England is taken from the letter that Gareth wrote to the nation in 2021, during the Euros that we were hosting. At the time, the pandemic was spreading across the world, and it was a big moment in all our lives. To me, that letter was such an impressive way to talk about why sport, in particular football, means so much to people in this country and across the world.

To me, it felt very philosophical in terms of why these sporting moments play such a significant part in our identity, our sense of belonging and our national story. Gareth used collective consciousness, almost like an academic, and it confirmed in my mind that his project went way beyond football.

It spoke to this extraordinary chapter in our national life, England and the wider UK, which has been an interesting one – chaotic, difficult, a time of division and instability. I got really excited about the idea of trying to make sense of that national moment but through the adjacent prism of the England men’s football team and the work they were doing to try to make sense of themselves and their nation.

How do you think football can change a nation?

Football is about creating collective memories. I’ve always wondered why, especially in the modern age, someone can sit at home with a massive screen television and a surround sound system and have a quality experience watching a quarter final of a World Cup on their own, but feel compelled to go and watch the game in a noisy pub where you have to queue for the toilet.I think it’s because you want to be with people and share that moment, both with people you know and people you don’t know. What is a nation if not the story we tell ourselves about ourselves?

I think people want to really feel that. I feel lucky to come from a playwrighting background, so I know the power of theatre and being in proximity to people watching something very moving, hopeful or inspiring. I think sport does that, as does drama. When a nation tunes in, either together or apart, to watch a TV drama that speaks to a moment and we can’t stop talking about it - that’s what makes us a country and community.

What are the other themes of Dear England?

It does feel, particularly in England but across other countries too, that there’s a real existential anxiety about belonging and identity. England is a very old country and we’re pretty much the longest continually functioning democracy on earth that is still in existence.

But I think we’ve slightly lost the ability to imagine our future, and it feels like we’re stuck and stagnant, and have been for a long time. Into that comes an insecurity about identity and cohesion; and some of that comes out very negatively. There is a toxic element to sport with hooliganism, violence and the ugly side of competitiveness where people think they’re better than other people.

Masculinity is also a theme in the series, with it being about the England men’s football team. There are a lot of men in this story, young and old. We explore questions like how do you play without fear, how do you play with joy, how do you play with freedom? I find that what Gareth Southgate represented and tried to do so positively was to inject some compassion and decency into the sport rather than being tough, punishing and hard.

That to me is wrongly thought of as being soft and easy. It’s actually incredibly challenging, muscular and robust to get a bunch of lads to share what they’re struggling with and to accept that we all get scared, we all lose, we all get humiliated and it’s hard to come back from that. To me, that’s the message here.

It’s about how to instill resilience in anybody, but particularly young men. Yes, you might lose, you might fail and it will hurt at the time - and you can either be the best version of yourself after that, or the worst version.