Sex, Death and the Destruction of Britain

Thanks to Miri AF for pointing me to the predictive programming in the 2019 series Years and Years.

The series forewarned many things, including war in Ukraine, a pandemic (Monkey flu), floods and the rise of a "far right" figure which is a sort of hybrid of Nigel Farage and Katie Hopkins. But don't worry; everything will be cool and groovy by 2030 when the UN's sustainable development goals are due to be met.

All modern forms of art lend themselves to deconstruction; the surface 'text' is about one thing and the deeper 'sub-text' is about something else. The signifier not only points to the signified, but always implies it's opposite. On the surface Years and Years is about techno-utopia and putting fascists in prison, but really it's about sex and death.

Years and Years is a creation of Russell T. Davies, beloved of the BBC, who has offered the public such gems as Queer as Folk and who revived Doctor Who and then later went on to destroy its ratings by retconning the lore. So he's a popular writer among TV cadres, but is he attuned to the zeitgeist and trends in technology and geopolitics? Or was he given a few bullet points by his controllers and told to cobble together a TV series?

Cobble it together he did. While Years and Years is replete of media narratives that we in 2025 are being pummelled with, the series is really about sex, and the pain caused by sexual disorder. So while, on the one hand, the Britain of Russell T. Davies, is the Britain in which people can make the most of their various sexual expressions, being the Britain of Henry Hose-Down VIII, Lord Mountbatten, Jimmy Saville and Prince Andrew, on the other, it is the Britain that lays bear pain, but does so in a happy-go-lucky, whimsical way, as a jaunty pop song may be about a break-up.

So, while the show predicts current media narratives such as eating "non-food", like algae, a "polycrisis", flooding, terrorist dirty bombs, blackouts, amd a financial crash, the male characters just explore their sexual freedom. The female characters come across as altogether more asexual, which speaks of Davies's perennial main topics.

The sub-text of sex points not so much towards jouissance, but towards death and not la petite mort, but physical passing.

The character around which all the action evolves is the grandmother of four siblings, Muriel Deacon, and the large decaying house in which she lives. Perhaps there is an intentional reference to Queen Elizabeth II and the state of the United Kingdom. Her children have the surname Lyons. By the end of the series there are three of them like the lions on the coat of arms of England.

The mother of the four Lyons children passed away after their father, Vince, ran off with one "Jacqueline". The children hate him for this. They also hate the second family he created. Dads are bad, dontcha know?

The progeny of Vince are a homosexual who leaves his husband for a quickie with a "Ukrainian" refugee when he thinks the world is going to end in a nuclear war, a single mother with two children from different men, a son who despite being married with children carries on with some other women, and a daughter, who like Greta Thurnberg, travels around the world protesting, although it's never clear why because she doesn't have a coherent worldview. Eventually, she gets involved in lacklustre Lesbian companionship.

Onto this mess, the government of the Farage-Hopkins hybrid is imposed. This caricature manages to get elected by having a nonsensical, yet vaguely populist platform - like Trump or Farage. Naturally, she sets up concentration camps for 'the homeless' and 'migrants'. It's the straight white man of the Lyons, of course, who denounces his deceased brother's squeeze to the authorities who promptly put him in a concentration camp where the dastardly plan is to get him to die of 'monkey flu'.

So much for the sex, let's get to the death. The euthanasia propaganda starts when, Bethany, daughter of the philanderer, Stephen Lyons, and his wife Celeste announces she is transhuman and wants to kill her body so she can be uploaded to the internet. No one mentions what might happen if someone pulls out the plug. But despite wanting to top herself, the uploading technology to do so doesn't exist at this point in the show.

Daniel Lyons who is obsessed with the Ukrainian, dies when he gets into a rubber dinghy to smuggle his squeeze back into England. For some reason, the Ukrainian lover is considered part of the Lyons family. Why? We aren't told.

It is implied that the death of the Lyons's mother is the fault of the philandering of the aforementioned Vince. Vince dies during the course of the series and rather than cremate the body, he is dissolved in water. Each attendee at the funeral gets a vial of dissolved Vince. The Lyons children, of course, drink theirs, mocking their father. Death is fun, kids!

Edith Lyons ends up with cancer because of some China/Russia/USA something. So naturally when she dies she uploads her brain into some watery internet-like substance (technology has advanced by this episode). During this upload process she has a blissful look on her face. Death is brill, kids! Afterwards the characters assume she's 'everywhere', like Lucy in the eponymous Luc Besson film. This was foreshadowed when Bethany gets implants and says she can feel the whole world through the internet. It's like having the higher consciousness promised by the LSD pushers of the 1960s. It didn't work with acid and DMT, it's not going to work with silicon chips.

Anyway, this all turns out OK, because once the good sexual-diverse burgers of Yookay find out about the concentration camps, they stream it on social media and so outraged are they by this that the far-right Farage-Hopkins mutant is put in prison and the BBC is put back on air; it was banned, dontcha know? So everything comes good by 2030.

The citizens manage to rebel against the Farage-Hopkins mutant (despite having voted for it), because they have not yet uploaded themselves to the internet. Once they un-alive themselves, rebellion won't be possible. What's more, it's unclear whether there'll be any sexual pleasure in the virtual world. This is suggested in the character of Bethany who is the mostly technology obsessed and seems oddly asexual.

Years and Years does predict media narratives that we are currently suffering, but it does so in an incoherent way. It attempts to tie it all together through the sexual misadventures of a couple of men. The women put up with it, mostly, and come across as largely asexual, like a fruit-fly at a gay disco. Davies just can't give the full range of emotion, including sexual, to his female characters.

Davies was 56 when Years and Years was made. It is wish fulfilment created around a structure of narratives that the owners and controllers of global financialised capital thought useful. Sex and immortality is what it pretends to present, but really it shows death and destruction. The destruction of Britain through the failure of its institutions is one destruction. Destruction of human rights is another - because of Bethany's implants she is 'owned' by the government - due process is suspended as people are put into concentration camps. But it's also destruction because the men just won't stand up and take responsibility. Both Lyons sons shirk their duties because of sex. The female characters don’t try to put and end to this. We never really find out whether they just don't want to object or are incapable of doing so.

So rather than show how to defeat fascism, Years and Years shows how effeminate men, that is, men who don't know how to keep their passions under control, lead to the death of a society.

By chasing sex and embracing death with technology, Britons just fizzle out. Uploads and cummies put an end to everything. Rather than going out with a bang, no pun intended, the sex-obsessed milquetoasts peter out, leaving only a fragile internet which lasts only as long as the power grid AI decides not to reroute energy to something more worthwhile.

Bye, bye, bongs. As for the rest of you, see you poolside.