The chronicling of Covid

with Covid, everyone was trying to do their best; no one was thinking, ‘I wonder if there’s a way that I can get more people to die from Covid.’ Obviously, big mistakes were made.” These included delaying the lockdown, he said, which it is widely accepted cost thousands of lives.

“It’s incredibly impressive inside the Department of Health to inside a care home to inside a hospital. Piecing all that together, you could see the thing we’d just experienced in a different way.”

Johnson, though, is This England’s central character. “Not only was Boris the Prime Minister and therefore ultimately responsible for how the Government

“Because Boris is such a famous figure you just had to have the best possible actor to play him… and so we picked Kenneth Branagh… fortunately, he wanted to play Boris.

“It’s hugely difficult when you’ve got someone who’s not only famous and current, but also has such a big, clearly defined image himself… the real Boris has almost a cartoon projection of Boris; he’s almost acting Boris himself. That makes him a very difficult person to impersonate and I thought Ken did a great job.” what the scientists did. The Chinese put out the genetic code of the virus incredibly quickly and, over a weekend in Oxford, they worked out the structure of their vaccine – it’s just incredible.”

Winterbottom described This England as a “mosaic”. He said: “We could hop from inside the Jenner Institute to responded, but he also got Covid himself… he was in intensive care and close to dying,” he said. Subsequently, of course, Johnson became embroiled in the Partygate scandal and resigned as Prime Minister – events that the Sky Atlantic drama could not include, with the film already in the can.

Winterbottom added: “You couldn’t do a story which included Boris without trying to engage with his personal life – his personal life was as turbulent as his political life at that time.” ■

‘In conversation with Michael Winterbottom’ is at www.rts.org. uk/event/conversation-michaelwinterbottom

At a screening of the new ITV1 series Cold Case Forensics, made by ITV Cymru Wales, leading forensic scientist Dr Angela Gallop revealed that, in a crime scene, “every contact leaves a trace. It’s just whether or not we’re clever enough to find it.”

She was discussing her role in the three-part series at its January premiere, which was organised by ITV Cymru Wales in partnership with RTS Cymru Wales.

Interviewed by Wales at Six anchor Jonathan Hill, Gallop explained how, in the series, she used DNA profiling to solve three high-profile murder cases, focusing on the horrifying deaths of Rachel Nickell, Stephen Lawrence and, in the premiered episode, the murder of Lynette White in Cardiff in 1988.

The last case had resulted in one of the UK’s worst miscarriages of justice in which five men, “the Cardiff Five”, were wrongly imprisoned but later released on appeal, two years later.

Gallop’s career started after