Why was Dear England made? James Graham's answer starts thirty years ago
The BBC's four-part Dear England arrived on BBC One on 24 May 2026, three years after James Graham's play about Gareth Southgate sold out the National Theatre. Ask Graham why he wrote it, though, and he doesn't start with Southgate the manager.
He starts with a penalty kick in the summer of 1996.
It begins at Euro 96
Graham, then a teenager in Nottingham, was performing in his first school play — Of Mice and Men — the night England met Germany in the Euro 96 semi-final at Wembley. The cast watched on TV as they came off stage, and then Southgate missed.
"I was in tears going home in the car with my mum," Graham told the Yorkshire Post in 2025, adding that he couldn't make sense of the loss.
That miss is where Dear England opens — and Southgate's slow conversion of that trauma into a management philosophy is the whole engine of the story. Graham first thought of writing the play while watching the 2018 World Cup in Russia, when England won a penalty shootout for the first time since 1996 on the way to the semi-finals.
Southgate had attacked the curse at its root: teaching his players a warmer, more open version of masculinity so the fear of the spot-kick lost its grip.
Graham has been upfront about his method, telling interviewers on the play's 2025 tour, "I love putting institutions and systems on stage" — and few English institutions carry more baggage than the men's national team.
Where the title comes from
From Southgate himself. "Dear England" was the open letter he wrote to fans in 2021, during the pandemic and ahead of Euro 2020, about what playing for the country should mean.
The play kept being rewritten by real life
- 20 June 2023 — premieres at the National Theatre's Olivier stage, with Joseph Fiennes as Southgate, directed by Rupert Goold. The original ending: Harry Kane's missed penalty against France at the 2022 World Cup.
- 9 October 2023 to 13 January 2024 — West End transfer to the Prince Edward Theatre.
- 2024 — wins the Olivier Award for Best New Play; Graham rewrites the ending after England lose the Euro 2024 final to Spain and Southgate resigns.
- 2025 — a 16-venue national tour, with Gwilym Lee taking over as Southgate.
- 24 May 2026 — the BBC series lands, with Fiennes reprising the role alongside Jodie Whittaker as team psychologist Pippa Grange and Jason Watkins as FA chairman Greg Dyke.
Why football, on a stage?
Because, in Graham's telling, the England team is where the country argues with itself — about identity, pride, masculinity, and how to lose.
He's called Southgate a Shakespearean character, telling BBC News in 2023, "what he experienced in 1996 and how he translated that trauma into redemption."
For the record: one missed kick in 1996 eventually produced an Olivier-winning play, a West End run, a national tour, and a BBC drama. Not a bad return on the worst moment of Southgate's career.