Dear England airs on One on Sunday at 9pm, bringing Gareth Southgate’s England story back to the screen in a four-part fictionalised drama built around the moments that defined his time in charge. Joseph Fiennes reprises the role that won praise on stage, while the opening scene cuts straight to Southgate’s missed penalty in the Euro 96 semi-final.
From there, the drama moves to 2016, when England crashed out of the Euros to Iceland and Brexit was looming over the country. Sam Allardyce is then shown being asked to resign by the Football Association after lasting one game as England manager, before Southgate steps in and turns to psychologist Dr Pippa Grange in an attempt to address the team’s mental blocks.
The scale of the project helps explain why the broadcast matters now. James Graham wrote the Olivier award-winning play that adapted, and the television version keeps the same broad ambition: to use football as a way into a bigger argument about English identity. The script brings in English values, shifting ideas of masculinity and racism among fans, with Southgate’s own words threaded through the drama. The title comes from the open letter he wrote in 2021 after backlash over the team taking the knee.
That link to recent football history gives the series a sharper edge than a standard sporting biopic. The review points to the fact that the references may land most strongly with viewers who lived through mid-2010s English football, when disappointment felt routine and every new manager arrived carrying the same burden. Southgate’s line, “Come help fix England with me,” captures that pressure, while his later reflection, “This is what it is to be an England fan,” suggests the show is less interested in triumph than in the emotional cost of expectation.
The tension in Dear England is not just whether Southgate succeeds, but whether any manager can untangle the contradictions the story lays at England’s feet. It starts with a penalty miss in 1996 and runs through the failures that followed, but the larger question the drama keeps returning to is how much of the nation’s football culture sits outside the touchline. Sunday’s One broadcast puts that debate back in front of a mass audience, and it does so at a moment when the symbols around England football still carry more weight than the results on the pitch.
