W1A and Twenty Twelve creator takes us behind the pen on his all-new series Twenty Twenty Six

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

John Morton is musing on Ian Fletcher’s latest career move. “It wasn’t a plan to do W1A when I was doing Twenty Twelve, and I never thought after W1A that I’d be sitting here having written another iteration of it.”

Yet here we are in Twenty Twenty Six: 15 years since first gracing our screens, Fletcher – a role so comfortably inhabited by Hugh Bonneville that he’s practically sewn into his suit – is back, and equally baffled at how he’s ended up in Miami as director of integrity in the run-up to the 2026 World Cup, leading a new crop of faces in the strategic operations group.

“I wanted to show a side of Ian at the beginning of this series that you haven’t seen before – the first day of big school, asking: ‘Where do I sit?’, ‘Who can I trust?’,” says Morton.

He’s also keen to show how the escalation of 24-hour social media has transformed Fletcher’s role over the years. “You’re in constant damage-limitation mode and can never stay ahead of the narrative. You see it in any public-facing organisation, in politics, even as a headmaster: something happens, you can’t sleep on it.”

Fish out of water he might be, but at his core, Fletcher’s still a man trying to do the right thing. “Planning the World Cup is the most ludicrous setting in which to try to do that, with a much more disparate group of people than we’ve seen him with before.”

Morton characterises Fletcher as “a subset of a kind of Britishness – a sort of BBC-ness, funnily enough”. Which begs the question: nine years after W1A, doesn’t Ian – and Morton – have unfinished business with the corporation? In the run-up to licence-fee renewal, as it lumbers from one self-inflicted crisis to another, whether tying itself in knots over Gaza or triggering a lawsuit from the US President, why not just return Fletcher to Broadcasting House for more chaos?

“I can’t quite remember why W1A came to an end, but there’s a finite number of shapes you can make with any raw materials,” he reflects, stressing that none of his series are constructed as a takedown of any institution. He wants to shine a light on flawed people trying to do their best – which is an apt description of the BBC, particularly when it becomes the story.

“Every institution has its faults, and one thing I admire about the BBC is that it airs its faults better than anybody else, and continues to do so. They’re one of the best things about us as a nation.”

Whatever the setting, human foibles and the “small p” politics of the workplace are Morton’s thing. He admits he’s “not temperamentally suited” to savage satire: for example, President Trump barely warrants a mention in Twenty Twenty Six. “This is, for better or worse, kinder than that. It sits in a very close parallel universe to the real world.”

His golden rule for mentioning real-world figures is that nothing his characters say about them can be true, leading to deliciously absurd lines in David Tennant’s narration – such as Selena Gomez attending a photoshoot “for the launch of her new range of opinions”.

Similarly, while Morton spent a couple of weeks in Chicago and Miami talking to people involved in US soccer, he declined to use any of their stories to avoid inviting direct comparisons. He has harboured a great many trade secrets and insights over the years, but only one detail consciously made its way into his work. When he learned that Olympics executives arrived at work on folding bikes but couldn’t fold them up, it was too irresistible not to use for Fletcher.

“I like listening to people, but I hardly ever write a phrase down,” he says. “I prefer to immerse myself. I might watch five minutes of a Miami news channel to get into the zone, but I wouldn’t dignify that by calling it research.”

It’s inescapable that in tying the series to a single event that takes place weeks after it airs, Morton’s created a premise that can’t sustain a second series. Where could Fletcher end up next?

“People keep pointing out that the Olympics go to Los Angeles in 2028,” he says. “I’m loyal to the characters and the actors, but this has been two and a half years of my life, flat out, absolutely pedal to the metal. I’m so slow as a writer. Olympic rower Steve Redgrave once said after winning a gold medal, ‘If anyone sees me go anywhere near a boat, you’ve got my permission to shoot me’. That’s currently, how I feel.”

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Twenty Twenty Six begins on Wednesday 8 April at 10pm on BBC Two and iPlayer.

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