Normally, my blog is about my work at Healthwatch or about politics – particularly about the horrors unfolding in the Middle East over the past year.
Having posted a personal story about my passion for motorsport a couple of weeks ago, though, I am again back onto that theme with this one. It is about something else currently on TV: the drama series ‘Senna’ now streaming on Netflix.
Like the story of Brawn, which I blogged about last time, the life of Ayrton Senna has the potential to appeal to a much wider audience than F1 fans. He was not only a triple world motor racing champion. He was also a fascinating personality and a national hero still revered in his native Brazil today, thirty years after his death. It is a story that should make for great TV.
So how does the Netflix dramatisation of Senna’s life measure up? (Warning: this review contains some spoilers.)
I have only seen the first three episodes so far but, as one review I have already read put it, I wouldn’t go further than describing it as “watchable.”
The portrayals of Senna’s childhood and family relationships in Brazil are quite engaging, along with the story of how he first came to the UK at the start of the 1980s before going on to win his first F1 World Championship in 1988.
But characterisation of Senna himself doesn’t seem very deep. That is probably more the fault of the writers than the actor, Gabriel Leone, who does a decent job in the role.
Both Leone and the producers of the series have also made an effort for him look and sound something like the real Senna.
Unfortunately, you can’t say that about most of the other motorsport figures that appear in the series. This is drama, not documentary, so I guess it shouldn’t be compulsory for the actors to physically resemble the real people they are portraying. The trouble is that their on-screen characters are so one-dimensional that they really do not do justice to people who played such a big part in what Senna achieved. Based on the first episode in which he appears, then McLaren boss, Ron Dennis’ character does not seem to be anything like the big personality who did so much to influence F1 over more than three decades. Ditto for the portrayal of Dick Bennetts whose West Surrey Racing team took Senna to the British Formula 3 championship in 1983. His persona and temperament are simply unrecognisable.
The fact that I know some of the personalities of the people involved here makes me feel all this quite acutely. The Netflix series should have taken far more care to portray them as they were and are. And it would have made for better TV too.
They have made a bit more of an effort to cast as Senna’s great rival, Alain Prost, an actor who looks a bit like him (Matt Mella). I’ll have to see in later episodes whether they try to capture the human complexity of Prost’s relationship with Senna or whether the French driver ends up being portrayed as a kind of pantomime villain as the story unfolds.
The series’ tendency to play fast and loose with history also takes on a rather nasty aspect in episode 2 which features Senna’s on-track battle with British driver, Martin Brundle, in 1983. British race fans are portrayed as being both blatantly racist and physically threatening in one memorable scene. I have no doubt that the loyalty of British fans at the time was indeed with Brundle rather than Senna but, having been around at some of those races, I recollect none of the ugly scenes that are shown in the series.
They may add to the drama but when racist violence in sport can be such a real and serious issue as we know it is today, to invent them in a historical drama like this is irresponsible.
There are other things about the series that are just lazy. For example, while the producers have made an effort to get scenes in places like Monaco looking like the real thing, they just have not bothered at all when it comes to the UK circuits in which Senna is shown racing early in his career. They all seem to be identical and set in an anonymous landscape that looks like nowhere in the UK.
Of course, the fact I am bothered about this may say more about my being a motorsport anorak than about the series’ potential appeal to a wider audience. But it still seems lazy to me that the producers have not made any effort to make the topography of the UK on screen look at least a bit like the UK in real life.
OK – grumbles over. The in-car racing sequences in ‘Senna’ are pretty good and overall it is watchable, as I say. I will still tune into the remaining episodes and – who knows – it may show greater depth as it nears the tragedy of Senna’s death at the San Marino Grand Prix on 1st May 1994.
I hope so. Ayrton Senna was a genius behind the wheel of anything he drove. A flawed genius but a genius nonetheless. Those who knew him also say he was an amazing person in so many ways outside the car.
His memory deserves more than Netflix offers in the first few episodes of ‘Senna.’
Postscript
Well, I have now watched the whole series. Did it improve?
For two of the concluding three episodes, my answer is no, not really. The kind of weaknesses that I described above were still much in evidence.
As for the finale, though, it is not that simple. Yes, some of the plot was still of questionable accuracy. Yes, the portrayals of most of the F1 figures who appear were still annoyingly one-dimensional. But there was an exception there. The Alain Prost character turned out to be shown not as a kind of pantomime villain, as I had feared he would be. The real Alain Prost has his fans and his detractors. Whichever side of that fence you are on, though, the series ends up portraying him as a nuanced figure in his relationship with Ayrton Senna. That is good.
I also have to admit that the way the series covered the tragedy of Senna’s last weekend was actually quite a tear-jerker. It brought out pretty effectively the personal torment that Senna is said to have gone through about whether he should quit racing altogether after the death of fellow driver Roland Ratzenberger the day before he was himself killed at Imola.
Perhaps the most impactful part of the entire series, though, comes right at the end. In its final two or three minutes, it unexpectedly shifts to real historical footage. An evocative collage of Senna’s life, his loves and key moments in his motorsport career suddenly appears. The series then closes with a moving recording of the real Ayrton Senna describing to camera some of the things that made him tick as a person.
Those few moments were well done. It’s a shame that most of the rest of the series fell short of what a drama about the life of Ayrton Senna really should have been.
