Joseph Fiennes plays Gareth Southgate. That sentence alone should be enough to grab any England fan — and the four-part BBC series Dear England lands on BINGE on May 28, just ahead of the World Cup.
The show dramatises Southgate's entire tenure as England manager, from his appointment in 2016 through to his resignation after the 2024 European Championship final defeat. It's based on James Graham's West End play of the same name, which won Best New Play at the Olivier Awards in 2024 — with Fiennes already in the lead role on stage.
What the series actually covers
The synopsis frames the whole thing around England's penalty curse: "The worst team track record for penalties in the world when he takes over." Southgate, of course, knows that pain personally — his own miss in Euro 96 haunted him for decades before he returned as the man tasked with fixing exactly that problem.
Jodie Whittaker plays psychologist Pippa Grange, whose work with the squad was a genuine turning point in how England approached the mental side of the game. That's not a minor subplot — her influence on the dressing room culture is arguably what separated Southgate's England from every failed tournament campaign before it.
The record Southgate leaves behind is genuinely worth examining: a World Cup semi-final in 2018, back-to-back European Championship finals in 2021 and 2024. England hadn't reached a major final since 1966 before him. He lost both, resigned, and the debate about whether that counts as success or failure still hasn't settled.
Timing couldn't be more deliberate
Premiering a month before the World Cup is a calculated move. England under new management, a nation still processing what Southgate built and then couldn't quite finish — the series drops straight into that conversation.
Fiennes told the Andover Advertiser it's been a "gift" to play Southgate on both stage and screen, and that the creative team has done "a phenomenal job" translating the theatre piece for television. Given the source material won at the Oliviers, the bar was already high.
Stream Dear England from May 28 on BINGE, available via Hubbl.
