I wrote a BBC drama about hope in a ‘left-behind’ town – but Britain changed faster than I could script it
The aspiration to write a “state-of-the-nation” drama is the great white whale of political writing. Take the work of legendary German playwright Bertolt Brecht. Exiled by Hitler to Scandinavia in 1933, he attempted to capture life in his homeland from anecdotes and verbatim accounts. The result, his state-of-the-nation play Fear and Misery of the Third Reich (1938) distilled a whole society into the pattern of gestures in a dictatorship.
I won’t place myself in Brecht’s company, but writing my six-part radio drama Good People for the BBC over the last year has felt like the headlong pursuit of a moving target.
My drama tells the tale of four young idealists who fall under the spell of a visionary thinker, Faith Abbott. They create a think-tank, Project Hope, to transform the fortunes of a left-behind town. I track my conflicted characters from the dog-days of the pandemic to an undisclosed near future where mainstream politics has collapsed and a populist revolt is unleashed.
Be careful what you pitch for. I devised the project during the brief honeymoon of Keir Starmer’s new government in summer 2024, as Democrat Kamala Harris seemed to reset the hopes of progressives world-wide and Trump reeled from assassination bids. By the time I got the greenlight, Trump was in, Kamala was history and Starmer’s government was floundering.
In a sense I had a head start, given populism was my theme and the east of England my setting. Even as Labour celebrated its “loveless landslide” in the east, Reform planted their few flags in sea-side towns like the one I took as my focus, Great Yarmouth – reinvented in the series as the fictive Branwich.
Yet even here, events outpaced my imagination. In July 2024 Yarmouth elected Rupert Lowe, a millionaire who’s since trolled the town from afar while picking fights with his former party leader Nigel Farage.
Yet beyond the mayhem of the news cycle, Good People maps much slower moving currents of life in the towns lining up behind Reform more out of despair than conviction.
Here I took inspiration from George Eliot’s great novel of provincial life Middlemarch (1871), which mercilessly dissects the ideals of would-be reformer Will Ladislaw as he enters the muddy realm of politics. Eliot’s focus is the era of the Great Reform Act of 1832, decades earlier, and that time lapse enables her to parse the complex weave of power in a locality.
The poverty in places like Yarmouth is not veiled or shy, it is blatant. You simply have to wander from its end-of-the-line station towards the sea to witness desolate social housing and multi-occupancy dwellings – wards where deprivation is baked in.
But equally startling is the hope: the artists making work, the councillors fighting to secure the town’s future, the generous tenor of a community with little to lose. As graffiti I spotted on a sea-wall proclaims: “Tough times never last, but tough people do.”
An audit of power
So yes, the state of the nation here seems critical. Yet following the Brechtian model it’s not sufficient to show and tell, it’s also necessary to analyse. With over five hours to play with, I could offer listeners an audit of how power works in the nation formerly known as the United Kingdom.
My characters’ fates track that; jumping on the AI bandwagon, moving into politics, withdrawing into prepping. They travel through the guts of parliamentary democracy, to the ruins of local government, to find a welfare state severed from its compassionate origins. Taking inspiration from the writings and practice of social thinker Hilary Cottam, in her invaluable book Radical Help (2018), I found myself exploring just how broken our social contract is.
This results in some surprising conclusions for a self-described eco-playwright. If we set aside small boats and social media stoked paranoia, the fires burning under populism seem to be about a democratic deficit as anything else. The feeling of top-down governance as one imperative after another has become conflated with the potential sources of hope itself – the green transition towards a fossil-fuel free economy. It’s certainly hard to miss the phalanxes of offshore wind facing the seafront in Yarmouth, or to note inland the steady roll out of cabling snaking through farmland.
Yet as journalist and novelist James Meek has shown further north in Grimsby or Blyth, this net zero gold rush is experienced as expropriation rather than opportunity. The imported turbines are often installed by multinationals barely denting employment in the town; the ports in which they base their operations are no-go areas beyond the reach of democracy. The vehicles of rapid growth – data centres and freeports – claim land and resource but rarely touch the lives of locals.
My characters find themselves snarled up in these tragic juxtapositions. Yet for all this Good People is not bleak, it’s an attempt to locate hope in dark times. While each episode begins with the endgame, it spools back to explore what might have been.
I once shrank from the notion of state-of-the-nation drama, feeling the presumptuousness of the term: how can a single story speak to a country as complex as our own? Yet right now, it feels like looking this moment in the face is the only way to think our way out of it. Brecht’s play, written in exile, with little hope of realisation, offers one model; Eliot’s novel written in retrospect, another.
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Steve Waters has received funding from the AHRC