I wrote a BBC drama about hope in a ‘left-behind’ town – but Britain changed faster than I could script it

I wrote a BBC drama about hope in a ‘left-behind’ town – but Britain changed faster than I could script it

Graffiti seen by the author in Great Yarmouth. Steve Waters, CC BY-NCThe aspiration to write a “state-of-the-nation” drama is the great white whale of political writing. Take the work of legendary German playwright Bertolt Brecht. Exiled by Hitler to Scandinavia in 1933, he attempted to capture life in his homeland from anecdotes and verbatim accounts. The result, his state-of-the-nation play Fear and Misery of the Third Reich (1938) distilled a…