The UK was a much more compassionate country two decades ago than it is now, with the tone of public conversation “dragged horribly to the right” by divisive figures such as Nigel Farage, the writer of a new BBC drama inspired by PJ Harvey’s Kosovan notebooks has said.

On Kosovo Field, a five-part drama that will air on Radio 4 over the course of a week from Monday, features unreleased song demos from the double Mercuryprize winner.

Fin Kennedy’s story grew out of the body of work Harvey created on and after a journey to Kosovo, Afghanistan and Washington DC that formed part of her research for her latest album The Hope Six Demolition Project and her book of poetry The Hollow Of The Hand. It centres on two Manchester-based siblings – played by Michelle Keegan and Nico Mirallegro – who return to Kosovo, from where they were evacuated during the conflict in 1999, in the hope of finding out what happened to their parents after a mass grave is discovered close to their native village.

“Kosovo came at the end of a decade of different regional conflicts linked to the breakup of the former Yugoslavia,” Kennedy said. “But look at what’s happening elsewhere in Europe now, the signs are really quite disturbing. We’ve got the far right on the rise in France, Italy, Poland, Germany, Hungary, we’ve got Brexit going on here, we’ve got Trump in America. Syria rumbling on in the background, and the huge implications for refugees in mainland Europe, particularly unaccompanied children.”



The two characters in his play came to Britain as unaccompanied children as part of the special evacuation programme to take in Kosovan minors. “That was set up and led by central government. Imagine them doing that today for Syrian children. We used to be much more compassionate,” he said. “It’s crazy. We’re the country that took in Kindertransport, that’s 10,000 Jewish children, unaccompanied, from the second world war, and so far we’ve said we’ll take in around 200 children from Calais, and only after NGOs have fought tooth and nail to get even that.

“On top of that, 38 out of 156 councils in England have so far refused to take part in resettling those who have arrived. Nigel Farage has a lot to answer for, among others. The tone of the conversation has been dragged horribly to the right. First there was the BNP and then Ukip. They seem to have infected our governing parties. The Tory party is being colonised by these ideas, and are running scared since Brexit of appearing to be soft on immigration.”

Kennedy’s starting point for On Kosovo Field was Harvey’s songs and diaries. He and the BBC producer Nadia Molinari then travelled to Kosovo, where they retraced some of Harvey’s steps and spent time talking to journalists, politicians and human rights activists working on conflict resolution and reconciliation. They found a country that was starkly young, energetic and lively, trying to forge its own identity while coming to terms with the psychological and physical effects of conflict.

“Today Kosovo is a fascinating place,” he said. “It’s the newest country in Europe and possibly the world. It was only declared independent in 2008, 70% of the population of Kosovo is under 35, 50% are under 25. They’re still trying to make sense of this post-conflict situation, many of whom were children during it. From the offset I was interested in having a pair of characters which were a metaphor for Kosovo, for this uncharted journey that a newborn country is embarking on. There’s even a famous statue in Pristina made up of the word ‘newborn’ built in 2008.”

Among those Kennedy and Molinari met wre the deputy mayor of Pristina, “who was very proud of his record of trying to rid the city of corruption”; a young sociologist and activist who “was very engaged in what she called reclaiming public spaces, she would hold memorials for the missing in the town square without official permission to do so”; and a political activist who as a student became famous for throwing red paint over the chancellor of Pristina University live on TV.

“He talked to us about the student-led protests around rising costs of living, and about visa reform,” Kennedy said. “It’s very difficult for anyone in Kosovo to get visas for elsewhere in Europe. Lots of European countries like Spain don’t recognise a breakaway state like Kosovo because they have their own successionist movements. Kosovans are all desperate to be part of Europe. They can’t imagine why we in Britain want to leave Europe, it seems crazy to them.”

“One of the most moving accounts I heard of the war was on the plane on my way home,” Molinari said. “I happened to sit next to a Kosovan man in his mid-30s who lives in Leeds now. He told me that when he was 17 and in the Kosovan Liberation Army he’d been captured and put in a Serbian concentration camp, how he watched members of his family executed in front him. He didn’t know where his parents were and wasn’t reunited with them for four years. He came to Britain as a refugee. There are still loads of missing people in Kosovo. They sent us a document and it was 70 pages of just names of missing people. There’s still mass graves being discovered. In Pristina you walked around the town squares and there was a big banner with all the faces of those still missing. How can a country get over that kind of trauma?”

For Seamus Murphy, the photographer and director who travelled through Kosovo, Afghanistan and DC with Harvey, and who spent time in Kosovo in the late 90s covering the war, revisiting areas of conflict is important to learn lessons for current or future crises.

“Kosovo was one of those stories that was huge, it was world headlines for months when the refugee crisis was going on, and then once Nato basically kicked Milošević out of Kosovo and the Serbian/Yugoslav military withdrew, the story was over as far as the media was concerned,” he said. “After that 9/11 happened, the world moved on and people weren’t interested any more in Kosovo or the Balkans.

“But these things are such universal experiences, something that’s happening now in Iraq or Syria was happening in Kosovo. In the heat of battle and the first draft of history, you hear things, the reporting is live and it’s incredibly important that that’s happening, but it’s also very important to then see things in hindsight, to talk to people and find out what their experiences were.”

Kennedy said: “Life goes on, and one of the roles of art is to chart how people survive these things and to offer some kind of hope for future people who find themselves in those situations.

“Revisiting parallel periods in recent history can be really powerful in counterpointing what is going on now. I wouldn’t say that Syria is exactly like Kosovo, of course it’s not, they’re hugely different, on different scales for a start, but I think the effects on us as nations in the west is key.

“There’s absolutely parallels about how we look after the neediest people in the world who come knocking on our door. It’s a test of us as a nation, and we’ve failed miserably recently. I hope dramas like this can help put them a bit more centre stage. The best of British isn’t Nigel Farage. It’s the big-hearted country that we used to be and I hope we can be in years to come.”