Review
Culture
Film & TV
Friendship
5 min read

I’m going to cling on to The Ballad of Wallis Island

This comedy about fans and idols touches the heart too

Steve is news director of Article 18, a human rights organisation documenting Christian persecution in Iran.

A couple site on a sofa, one holds a guitar
Cary Mulligan and Tom Basden.

A few weeks ago, a good friend of mine told me I needed to see The Ballad of Wallis Island.  

He said I’d like it. In fact, my friend went so far as to say he thought it would be one of my favourite ever films.  

And now, having gone to see the new comedy-drama, I can confirm that he was right.  

But just what was it about this film - quite short by modern standards at 1 hour 40 - that marked it out as one I would so obviously enjoy?  

I was considering this as I sat through it, and as my guffaws eventually gave way to tears, I had my answer. 

For when it comes to films - or anything in life, really - it’s those with deeper meaning that most enthrall me. 

And James Griffiths’ new film certainly has this in spades - it’s a “ballad”, after all - as well as a good dose of humour, epitomised by the inimitable Tim Key, whom some of you may know from the 2022 sitcom Witchfinder. 

As someone who grew up on the painfully awkward comedy of Ricky Gervais’ The Office, Key’s character, Charles, the bumbling super-fan of a folk duo, is a perfect blend of the endearing and the ridiculous. 

From the moment “the great Herb McGwyer” (played by Tom Basden) arrives on Wallis Island to be met by a host who swiftly sends him head over heels into the sea, the stage is set for the relationship that will dominate the narrative. 

Devotee and artist, wealthy loner and lonely superstar provide the perfect juxtaposition, whose success is no doubt aided by the fact that both lead actors were also co-writers. 

One suspects the film’s success may also have something to do with the time it spent in development, having first been produced nearly two decades ago as a BAFTA-nominated comedy short, titled The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island

But having now watched both 2025 film and 2007 short, which is available to watch online, the feature-length version is, to my mind, by far the better of the two. 

And while some of the jokes from the original remain, such as the manner of Herb’s comical arrival and eventual departure - though I won’t spoil the latter for you - there are some notable improvements. 

Chief among them, in my eyes, are the three female characters incorporated into the film: Carey Mulligan, who plays the second half of the McGwyer-Mortimer duo; Charles’ unseen former partner, Marie; and his new love interest, in the form of Wallis Island’s solitary shop-owner, Amanda (Sian Clifford). 

It’s funny to think that my friend pitched the film to me as a “Rom-com”, given that in the original concept there was not even a single female character, let alone any romance. Yet from this viewer’s perspective at least, it is the addition of the three women (including the unseen Marie) that make the film. 

Indeed, this major tweak to the plotline was the very element that ultimately brought tears to my eyes, as I considered the relational loss and loneliness that provide the common ground between the otherwise worlds-apart super-fan and idol. 

I saw the same look in this woman’s eyes as I had seen in Charles’s as he watched his hero play the song that was his former partner’s favourite. 

I was also forced to reflect upon the certain similarity I seem to share with the blundering Charles, having once lived two doors down from the real Carey Mulligan and, during our sole face-to-face encounter, chose the moment to express my great admiration for the music of her husband, Marcus Mumford, before awkwardly and very swiftly beating my retreat. 

I am embarrassed to admit that I even later posted a copy of one of my books into the Mumford letterbox - possibly that very same day - in the hope that it might engender the start of a beautiful friendship.  

Alas, I never heard from them again. 

A similar motivation is clearly the driving force behind Charles’ invitation of his two idols to his home, which is filled with their memorabilia, as the audience is encouraged to consider how they may feel if given the opportunity to host their own heroes. 

“Never meet your heroes,” Charles quips in the original short, but in the film the relationships are allowed to reach greater depths and, in spite of some initial suggestions that Charles’ affections may be bordering on stalker-like, it soon becomes clear that there is nothing sinister about this loveable simpleton. 

The rave reviews the film has received, years after the idea was first hatched, are also surely an encouragement to any of us who may have long held a dream but never seen it come to pass. 

The message of The Ballad of Wallis Island, I believe, is that we should hold onto such dreams and cling tightly to the things that matter most. 

Before sitting down to write this article, I was walking through a local park when I passed a young woman who was sitting on the grass, crying, and I approached her to ask if she was all right.  

It transpired that the woman’s partner had died a year before and that she liked to come back to the tree under which she was sitting to remember him, as it was a special place for them. 

I saw the same look in this woman’s eyes as I had seen in Charles’s as he watched his hero play the song that was his former partner’s favourite. 

"Cling to the things that matter most,” the woman told me, as we parted ways. And that’s certainly the message that both film and chance encounter have impressed upon me.

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 articles. All for free. 
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?
 
Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief

Review
Culture
Film & TV
Freedom of Belief
Politics
4 min read

Anna Politkovskaya took on the Kremlin and she paid the ultimate price

The Russian journalist who became a martyr for truth

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

A journalist wearing a body armour and a helmet looks defiant
Maxine Peak plays Anna.
Rolling Pictures

While truth recedes as a global public good, a war on journalists is taking shape. In 2024, the Committee to Protect Journalists recorded the highest number of journalists killed since collecting data thirty years ago. A large number of these were killed in Gaza, but there were deaths elsewhere: in Mexico, Syrian, Pakistan, Haiti, Myanmar.  Many more than these at least 124 journalists were physically threatened and abused online; an unknown number have been imprisoned and abused by state authorities, shadowy militias or criminal gangs. 

The illiberal tide is more powerful than the flow of liberal ideas today in the unregulated online market of opinion. A groundswell of distrust in so-called mainstream media has been effortlessly generated by sources with no obligations to impartiality and fewer professional standards round fact checking and evidence gathering. While every news source needs to be assessed for accuracy and fairness, the labelling of journalists as ‘enemies of the people’ by President Trump in his first term strayed into language used by the world’s despots. Territory occupied for many years by Vladimir Putin’s Russia. 

The 2025 film Words of War tells the story of Anna Politkovskaya, reporter for the Russian independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta who rose to fame, and therefore to the attention of the Kremlin, through unvarnished despatches from the first Chechen war that uncovered terrible war crimes. Moscow learned its lesson for the second war in Chechnya by declaring the whole region off limits to reporters. For Politkovskaya, this provided an extra incentive to be there, returning to the country over forty times to document ever more awful crimes of disappearance, rape, and torture. 

‘I witness very grave events and no-one else is reporting on them. I can’t not write about it’, Politkovskaya told the BBC’s Sarah Rainsford when they met. The meeting ended with some blunt Slavic advice: instead of interviewing a journalist about the war in Chechnya, the interviewer should be going there herself.   

Words of War has an unreal quality to it. The actors are English, but the scenes are entirely Russian. It is a reminder of Armando Iannucci’s dark comedy The Death of Stalin and even shares an actor in Jason Isaacs, who swaps General Zhukov’s blunt Yorkshire accent for the more cultured tones of Politkovskaya’s anxious husband, Sasha.  

Politkovskaya was a force of nature, and a devout Christian. She knew the kind of people she was messing with and what they were capable of, but she carried on the same, driven by an implacable will to truth. On flying to cover the appalling school siege at Beslan in 2004 – a scene the film begins with - she became violently ill, almost certainly a targeted poisoning like Alexei Navalny suffered on a plane over Siberia. 

I get intimidating calls, people hovering in my hallway, she observed. There’ve been so many threats, there was a time when my editors decided my life really was in danger.  But I’m used to it.  If the FSB is so opposed to me, it only proves that what I’m doing is effective. 

On October 7, 2006, Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead as she entered her block of flats with a handful of groceries. It was Vladimir Putin’s birthday. Five men were eventually found guilty of organising and carrying out the murder, but the person who ordered the killing was never found out. Speculation round how high the order came from is, in a way, superfluous: this is the nature of Russia’s state in the twenty first century.     

Elena Kostyuchenko is a millennial writer who features in the film as a young Novaya Gazeta intern and was inspired by her contact with Politkovskaya, ensuring a legacy in a younger generation: 

She was the first person I saw when I came to the Novaya Gazeta editorial offices. Tall, radiant, with silver-white hair, flying down the hall. I didn’t recognise her. I was just struck by her beauty. 

Stalin’s alleged mantra: no person, no problem, remains barely deniable Kremlin policy. The late politicians Boris Nemtsov and Alexei Navalny are simply the highest profile of a large cohort of individuals barely known in the west who have opposed Putin with stunning levels of bravery. Caricaturing Russians as corrupt, rapacious and violent – as well as being a lazy trope - is to abuse the names of an untold number who retain their dignity, integrity and agency. 

New histories are written in nations where regimes fall, but whether they tell a truthful story about the past depends on the environment the new authorities allow. The human rights group Memorial began this work in the early post-Soviet era, only to be shut down by Putin’s police officers. Words of War should have been made in Russia by Russians. One day maybe it will be, and Anna Politkovskaya will be seen across Russia for what she is: a martyr for truth.  And not an enemy of the people. 

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 articles. All for free. 
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?
 
Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief