"What might Britain and the world be like in about a decade’s time? According to Years and Years (BBC1), Russell T Davies’s thoughtful drama about the near future, it will be a grim, dangerous and, frankly, genocidal place. We’ve arrived at 2028, and because of climate change, Britain is suffering 60 days and nights of rain and floods. This, plus extensive coastal erosion, prompts mass evacuations and internal migrations, and the government passes emergency laws to force homeowners to take in displaced strangers. This is on top of a never-ending flow of refugees from upheavals and revolutions in Europe, and civil war in Ukraine.
Council estates become involuntary “gated” communities – to keep the residents penned in, rather than people locked out; there are energy shortages and blackouts; cyber-attacks and a “digital crash” to add to the global banking crash. The instability of the internet grows so severe that the country has to go back to paper – a strange, comical phenomenon to the kids of tomorrow’s world. The adolescents of the late 2020s prefer to have the government implant a computer wafer into their brains, leaving them half-human, half-iPad, and 100 per cent the property of His Majesty’s Government.
Bad as all that is, there are dark rumours about “the disappeared” - homeless people who go off to be resettled somewhere, never to be seen again…perhaps many thousands of them.
In this penultimate episode, events start to move more quickly, which makes for a very welcome change in pace. Now it is more like a political thriller, moving on from an often somewhat tortuous story of inner emotions.
The fortunes of the extended Lyons family finally start to mesh with Britain’s new prime minister – Vivienne “Viv” Rook (Emma Thompson), businesswoman turned politician and creator of her very own populist movement, the Four Star Party, so-called because she makes great play about using the kind of earthy language “ordinary people” use in the pub.
Rook wins power in a general election by stirring up a sort of dumbass, misguided sub-Churchillian patriotism: “Britain stands alone in the world. To the west, America is a lone wolf. To the east, Europe is in flames, and beyond that China is rising. In standing alone this country has never been more magnificent.”
www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/reviews/years-and-years-episode-5-review-tv-emma-thompson-bbc-rory-kinnear-a8953886.html
Scary stuff and much of it within the bounds of possiblity if we don't wake up and STOP BREXIT.
