Nigel Farage: the biopic. A disaster movie no one is waiting for | Stuart Heritage

We do not need a film about Brexit. Nobody needs a film about Brexit. If you want to see a film about Brexit, I can recommend a perfectly good workaround that involves finding a VHS copy of Threads and fast-forwarding it to two seconds after the bomb goes off. Any more than that and you are just wasting your time.

And yet, here we are. There is probably going to be a film about Brexit, or a big-budget TV show at the very least. Worse, it’s going to be about winning the Brexit vote. Worse, it’s going to be based on the self-congratulatory insider book The Bad Boys of Brexit: Tales of Mischief, Mayhem & Guerrilla Warfare in the EU Referendum Campaign. Worse, it’s thought that Nigel Farage is going to be an executive producer on the project. So, essentially, we are about to see an official Farage biopic about Farage’s “greatest victory” that’s been made by Farage himself. And you thought we had already suffered enough.

Admittedly, there has been a suspicious dearth of concrete information about this £60m project. The Telegraph, which first reported Brexit: The Movie, can only name the production company as a “major Hollywood studio”. In addition, it claims that the six-part film will start shooting in the new year and air in April, which seems an impractically tight schedule to film and edit a drama with a bigger production budget than Game of Thrones. The whole thing has an uncomfortable whiff of speculative desperation about it.

But that doesn’t mean it won’t get made. Of course it will. This is just how life works these days. With a news cycle determined to pachinko down to the worst-case scenario, we’re doomed to experience all major world events twice; first as they happen and then two years later on a big screen, re-enacted by people whose mouths look like a graveyard for exploded crockery. Clint Eastwood is making a film about the foiled 2015 terrorist attack on a Paris-bound train. We have already seen two separate films about the Boston marathon bombing this year alone. Last week, it was reported that someone is planning to make an Anthony Scaramucci biopic, and he was in the limelight for three days less than it takes me to break in a new pair of shoes. So, it’s inevitable. Farage’s Brexit will be dramatised one way or the other, whether we like it or not.

However, I can foresee a few problems with Farage: the motion picture. Clearly, the first is the likability factor. If this is the officially sanctioned story of Farage, then it has no choice but to put the man front and centre, rather than giving him a more realistic portrayal as someone who occasionally oozes in from the peripheries, reeking of stale smoke and decay, to the delight of nobody.

If this was a traditional Hollywood film, Farage would be a sporadic presence because, by all accounts, the more you know about him the less you like him. He would be the perfect choice for a moustache-twirling baddie. But this won’t happen, partly because he has to be the protagonist and partly because, since it only lasted a fortnight and looked as if somebody had absent-mindedly Pritt-Sticked a thimbleful of rat pubes to his face, his moustache was inherently untwirlable.

Handily, the reports seem to suggest a clever circumnavigation. Apparently, the series will be seen through the eyes of Gerry Gunster, the US pollster who was brought in to advise the Leave.EU campaign. By filtering everything through Gunster’s perspective, of a wide-eyed outsider, the hope will be to present Farage as a distant, shimmering, Gatsby presence. But then again, the real-life Gunster is best known for campaigning on behalf of corporations against sugary drinks taxes and bottle deposits – plus his big idea for winning the Brexit referendum was to hire a hypnotist – so if anything, he’s just as awful as Farage.

The second problem is when to end the story. You can’t end on referendum night, because Farage’s referendum night involved conceding and unconceding defeat over and over again until Susanna Reid roasted him on television the following morning. You can’t end on the most iconic image of the bad boys of Brexit – the one where he stands beaming in a golden lift with President-elect Trump – because Trump will have blown up half the world by next April, and that won’t be a tremendous addition to Farage’s legacy.

What’s left to climax with after that? Ukip losing all political currency? Farage taking a job as a DJ on a radio station that also employed Katie Hopkins? Farage tweeting a film review and getting called a twat 2,000 times in response? Perhaps it would be better if everyone just held fire until his career has stopped circling the drain.

Clearly the intention was to present Leave.EU as the Wolf of Wall Street; a raucous, freewheeling gang of rebels outsmarting the establishment at every turn. But wait until we are a bit further down the line, when Brexit has imploded and Farage still can’t get elected, and another Scorsese ending will present itself – that of Goodfellas. “Nigel Farage: everything was his for the taking – and now he gets to live the rest of his life like a schnook.”