Joseph Fiennes is back as Gareth Southgate in the ’s four-part adaptation of James Graham’s Dear England, bringing a role he first played on stage to One on Sunday at 9pm. The drama opens with the real 1996 penalty miss that defined Southgate’s England career before moving into the years that turned him into a national figure.
That return matters because Fiennes is not just reprising a character; he is stepping back into a part that drew praise on the West End and now has a much larger audience. The opening image takes viewers straight to Euro 96, when Southgate missed from the spot in the semi-final, and then on to 2016, when England crashed out of the Euros to Iceland while he was still managing the under-21 men’s team and soon after being asked to step in as caretaker coach. In the stage version, Southgate’s line was that this is what it is to be an England fan, with the message to supporters framed as a call to come help fix England with him.
Dear England is built from Graham’s Olivier award-winning play and uses the England team as a way to look at national identity, changing ideas of masculinity and the racism that still shadows football culture. Jodie Whittaker plays psychologist Dr Pippa Grange, part of a story that mixes real events with fictionalised elements around Southgate’s rise to the job that would later define him.
The casting is also part of the appeal and part of the provocation. Some of the actors look nothing like the real people they are playing, but the production is leaning less on imitation than on the larger argument behind the play: why Southgate’s England spoke to people beyond football and why that conversation still lands now. The adaptation appears to keep that focus intact rather than turning the story into a straightforward sporting biopic.
What viewers will see on Sunday is not just a return for Fiennes, but the first television test of a stage drama that connected with audiences by treating football as a national mirror. If it works on screen, it will be because the story still has something to say about England itself, not only about the man who once missed the penalty and later tried to rebuild the team around that memory.
