The BBC’s newest drama certainly promises to pack a punch.
Written by Stephen Butchard, Prisoner 951 tells the story of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the British-Iranian national who was held against her will in prison for a staggering six years after being arrested on falsified charges of spying.
With Narges Rashidi playing Nazanin and Joseph Fiennes her husband, Richard, it’s set to be a nail-biting watch – as much for its portrayal of how inept the British foreign office was in tackling the problem, as for the horrific way Nazanin was treated in captivity.
That includes the ways in which the then-Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, tackled the case. But Johnson’s involvement posed a problem for the showrunners. How do you include a cameo of an unserious politician without it turning the drama into a joke?
Ken Branagh put on a face full of prosthetics to play Johnson in Sky’s Covid-19 show This England, but he was a main character. But in Prisoner 951, it was his careless comments on the periphery that endangered a British citizen’s life.
In 2017, Johnson told a Foreign Affairs Select Committee that Zaghari-Ratcliffe was in Iran “simply teaching people journalism,” though in fact this was not true: she was in Iran visiting relatives for the Iranian new year.
Though her family and employers immediately pushed back on this, it was too late for Nazanin: the Iranian authorities seized upon the statement and said it was proof that she had in fact been conducting “propaganda against the regime.”
In a statement afterwards, the foreign office said that Johnson’s remarks “provide no justifiable basis on which to bring any additional charges against Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe” and that Johnson himself was planning to call his Iranian counterpart to “ensure his remarks are not misrepresented.”
But the damage was done. Johnson’s ill-advised comments certainly had an impact on the case – not least because it gave the Iranian state ‘grounds’ for sentencing her to more years in prison. In 2022, Zaghari-Ratcliffe actually met Johnson (who was by then the Prime Minister) and told him that she had “lived in the shadow” of his words ever since he’d uttered them.
Afterwards, her husband Richard said that the meeting was “warm”, but when he was asked if the Prime Minister had apologised for the “mistakes” he’d made, he replied, “Not explicitly.”
When it came to making the show itself, though, Butchard decided not to cast Johnson – for fear of his ‘involvement’ detracting attention from the story.
“I decided we shouldn’t have an actor,” Butchard told Radio Times. “Boris Johnson is almost a caricature himself, and if you bring in an actor to play that caricature, you get a buffoon. You might want to do it, but it wouldn’t be truthful.”
Instead, he says, “you look for archive footage – from the news, say – and you play what he said off other characters.” Rather than an actor, we’ll all get to see Johnson’s actual face via news clips taken from the time he made those comments. Something to look forward to.
Prisoner 951 is streaming on BBC One from November 23
