The Way Monday 9.00pm BBC1
Michael Sheen wanted to direct a dystopian drama about a Port Talbot steelworker becoming a refugee in his own land after the blast furnaces close down. Then his nightmare turned into reality…
DURING RECENT YEARS that have seen five prime ministers, a pandemic, Brexit, wars in Ukraine and Gaza, queues at food banks, frequent critical incidents in the NHS, as well as royal deaths and illnesses, many of us may have wondered if this country is falling apart.
However, actor Michael Sheen was ahead of the game. “In around 2016,” he says, “I started to think about what might lead to complete social breakdown in the UK, with Britons becoming refugees in their own country.”
The result is The Way, a three-part BBC1 drama in which the sudden closure of the steelworks in Port Talbot – where the 55-year-old Sheen grew up and has now returned to live with his partner and young daughter – causes a state of emergency in Wales. It forces Geoff (Steffan Rhodri) and his family to flee to safety across the UK. The series is set in a notional near-future but became unsettlingly real when, last month, Tata Steel announced the closure of its Port Talbot blast furnaces with the likely loss of 2,800 jobs.
“We always knew which way the wind was blowing with the future of the steelworks,” says Sheen. “Nevertheless, it’s extraordinary that we’re releasing at this moment a story about the fear of the blast furnaces going out. To be honest, I’d rather we were less on the nose and people were keeping their jobs, but it certainly adds a huge amount of resonance.”
Sheen has political experience both fictional – having played former PM Tony Blair three times in the films The Queen, The Deal and The Special Relationship – and factual: he is often described as an “actor activist” for his campaigns against high-interest payday loans and on green issues. But he was keen to have a cabinet of advisers around him as he worked on this drama: screenwriter James Graham (Sherwood) and Adam Curtis, a multiple Bafta winner for archive documentaries including The Power of Nightmares and Russia 1985–1999: Trauma-Zone. (See page 23.)
Graham wrote Quiz, the 2020 ITV drama about the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? “coughing Major” fraud, in which Sheen played Chris Tarrant. “Viewers will probably assume James and I got together through Quiz,” says the actor, “but we first talked about The Way many years ago. As a writer, he has the ability to mix the big state-of-the-nation stuff with the warmth of people and character and a sense of comedy. That fitted our vision of a sitcom happening in the middle of a zombie film.
“I then wondered who might be a good person to talk to abou
