We're between leaders, and the quietly resonant thing on iPlayer is about a man trying to be a good one

Some television only becomes about what it is about when the calendar catches up with it. Dear England — James Graham's four-part adaptation of his own Olivier-winning play, with Joseph Fiennes as Gareth Southgate — has been sitting on iPlayer since it aired in late May. It was good then. This week it reads differently, and the reason has nothing to do with the show and everything to do with the news.

Consider the week it is being watched in. England play a World Cup match tonight. The country is, formally, between leaders — Sir Keir Starmer announced his resignation on Monday, and Labour's contest to replace him will not conclude until the summer. And the drama quietly holding its own in the background is about a decent, awkward, much-doubted man trying to change what a national team — and, the play always insisted, a nation — believes about itself.

That is what this corner of the paper is for: not reviewing the thing, but noticing what we reach for, and when. Because we do not choose what resonates. The week does.

Graham's subject was never really football. Dear England takes its title from the open letter Southgate wrote to the country in 2021, and its real material is leadership of an unglamorous kind — patience, decency, the slow rebuilding of confidence in an institution that had stopped believing in itself. It asks what English identity is allowed to feel like, and whether a leader can model calm without being mistaken for weak. The reviews were not unanimous — the Guardian called it a stirring take on national identity; others found Fiennes' Southgate closer to impression than performance — but the disagreement is itself revealing. We argue about how to portray a good leader because we are not sure we would recognise one.

You can see the same preoccupation spreading across the schedules: there is a new comedy set inside a fictional Number 10, all-too-familiar problems and all. There is an appetite, suddenly, for stories about the people who hold the difficult jobs — not the strongmen, but the strugglers. No spoilers here, for any of it; half the pleasure is watching these things land in real time.

It is worth asking why now. The charitable read — and this paper prefers the charitable read — is that a country sensing a vacuum at the top goes looking, in its drama, for a rehearsal of the thing it is missing. Not escapism exactly. More like a fitting room: trying on versions of leadership to see which one we would actually want, while the real decision is being made elsewhere by other people.

Which is where it meets the question we keep coming back to. When the structures feel uncertain — when the people in charge step back, when the work itself is changing under us — culture is one of the ways a society thinks out loud about what it values. We watch a drama about a quiet man trying to be good at an impossible job, in the same week we are choosing someone for an impossible job, during a tournament that asks a whole country to hope at once. None of that is a coincidence of mood. It is a country using its evenings to work something out.

Dear England is on iPlayer. It is better this week than it was in May. That is not the show changing. That is us.