Britain’s Brexit chaos

Brexit: The Uncivil War explores the lateral political campaign behind one of the most con­tested referen­dums in modern history.

Benedict Cumberbatch as Dominic Cummings in Brexit: The Uncivil War.

Surveying the continuing chaos in Britain at the moment, it still seems difficult to understand just why most people voted to leave the EU. Enter Brexit: The Uncivil War, the 92-minute telemovie written by James Graham and dir­ected with great cinematic facility by Toby Haynes, which explores the lateral political campaign behind one of the most con­tested and controversial government referen­dums in modern history. It was a crusade that, for all its falsehoods and clever disinformation, successfully claimed that liberating Britain from the shackles of the EU would enable it to ­reclaim its former glory.

At its centre was Dominic Cummings, played here with his own brand of conceptual brilliance by the mercurial — and almost unrecognisable — Benedict Cumberbatch. Cummings was the little-known anarchic campaign director viewed by Westminster, according to Graham, as not only the “Antichrist” and a “pseudo-intellectual” but also a “genius” and “the Messiah”.

The series, like the campaign itself, is a wonderful parade of the tragicomic scenes that Cummings believes are created by “some of the basic atoms of human nature — fear, self-interest and vanity”, as he wrote recently in a rare piece in The Spectator. As scintillating, witty and entertaining as it is, this clever film still leaves you with a terrible sense of emptiness as you ask: just how has Britain gained and were its prospects indeed transformed?

Graham says he based his narrative on the books All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class by Sunday Times political editor Tim Shipman and Unleashing Demons: The Inside Story of Brexit by David Cameron’s communications director, Craig Oliver, and on interviews with the campaign strategists involved, Cummings in particular.

“Everyone knows who won,” Cummings tells us at the start of this mesmerising story. “But hardly anyone knows how.”

His trick was to persuade more than half the country that leaving Europe would deliver £350 million a week to the National Health Service and that the EU was about to admit Turkey and overwhelm white Britons with millions of jihad-inspired Muslims. The slogan he has his acolytes shout in their tiny headquarters as he stands on a table exhorting them is simple: “350 million pounds and Turkey”.

Cummings manages to feed a toxic culture where, as one of his adversaries says, “no one believes anyone or anything”. Through his own street-level investigations — he loathes focus groups — he discovers people want to take Britain back, whatever that means, to restore the cherished myths, Europe a cipher for everything bad happening or that has ­happened to Britain. And in one of his many epiphanies, he coins the slogan Take Control, which later becomes, after another road to Damascus moment, Take Back Control. That it was all based on lies was neither here nor there.

He has no time for prima-donna politicians, back-covering bureaucrats or “the same old tired politics of short termism and self-serving, small-thinking bullshit”.

Played by Cumberbatch, Cummings speaks in a not always easily understood personal jargon and hears the strange static of change in his ears, at one stage even going outside to lay on the road to hear more clearly. But he is absolutely certain of one thing: the future is a controversial data-led strategy, information mined from social media that not only discovers new key voters but reveals what they think.

In one of the best scenes towards the end he appears to accept, just slightly mind you, some accountability for having trolled the nation, still harbouring a belief that what he has done will improve society. “The train coming down the tracks isn’t the one that you expected; it’s not the one advertised on the boards; it isn’t even the one that I imagined but I accept it and you can’t stop it,” he tells his adversary, Oliver, played with some slightly woebegone empathy by Rory Kinnear, who oversaw the Remain communications strategy.

It’s a superb scene, played in a kind of super naturalism, quite different in style to so much of the comically tinged script. (Cumberbatch says it was dramatised slightly tongue-in-cheek to reference Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in Heat, though “I couldn’t imagine two people less like Pacino and De Niro”.)

While the series takes some pains not to ­really morally judge Cummings or the way he so casually fed a toxic culture, as presented here, it’s obvious Cummings had little coherent plan for Britain’s future but simply hoped for some visionary to arrive magically and do something “to make a change”. The series is careful to have a bit each way.

The possibly illegal machinations of the Brexiteers are only lightly touched on — Nigel Farage and Arron Banks are por­trayed as red-nosed vaudeville clowns — and it’s impossible not to cheer on Cumberbatch’s wonderfully ­realised Cummings, much to your own growing sense of dismay if you happen to believe Britain should not leave the EU, but it’s obvious there’s more going on than we are given.

Cummings, according to this vastly entertaining film, was a man of wider visions who simply did not believe the political system worked. The chaos that has eventuated suggests he just may have been right.

Fred Brophy in You Can't Ask That.

The ABC’s highly original and internationally successful You Can’t Ask That, ­created by Kirk Docker and Aaron Smith, ­returns this week, and welcome it is too. They’re both highly experienced as originators of ­slightly off-the-grid TV material: Smith a cinematographer, director and producer whose ­experience spans documentary, drama and television comedy, and Docker a Walkley Award-nominated journalist and producer responsible for some of Australia’s most groundbreaking youth content.

They started serendipitously here with the simple but compelling brief of “marginalised and misunderstood”, intrigued by the idea of what would happen if you allowed people to ask society’s outsiders about ­issues they normally would shy away from asking, especially for fear of being offensive or ­unintentionally embarrassing or even harassing them.

The result was a subtle and, as it proved, highly entertaining hybrid form of nonfiction public affairs TV, an innovative example of a factual format exercised in the pursuit of civic education and social argument. The power and flexibility of the format resulting in 10 inter­national versions of the show already broadcast, each evolving through the prism of different ­interpretations and languages. They all bring a local spin to the series, even down to the title — for example, the title of the Israeli ­adaptation translates to Excuse Me For Asking.

With the fourth season, Docker and Smith resolutely stick to what has worked so well for them, the concept still as diabolically clever as when it began. Eight carefully chosen guests from across Australia simply answer anonymous online queries about their lives collated by the producers in front of a seemingly static camera against a white scrim or backcloth.

A few largish lights on stands are scattered around and two cafe-like stools sit in front of the scrim, on which the guests perch and chat direct to the camera, which is operated by Smith, the coverage often a simple two-shot alternating with various close-ups. The whole thing brilliantly and empathetically edited by Henry Ang and Jenny Hicks.

This season features boxing tent operator Fred Brophy; former ­politicians; disaster survivors; those who have experienced domestic and family violence; African-Australians; intersex people; those knockabout fairground show people called carnies; and deaf people. The first episode is one of the most confronting to have been broadcast, enabling eight survivors of domestic and family violence to reflect on their experiences of living in abusive and controlling relationships, which they do with courage, grace and ­occasionally a brave sense of humour.

Brexit: An Uncivil War, Saturday, 8.30pm. BBC First.
You Can’t Ask That, Wednesday, 9pm, ABC.