Shane Meadows and Tom Harper (2010)

News of a sequel to This is England was a cause for excitement and apprehension.  Four hours of new work by Shane Meadows on Channel 4 was almost bound to be the highlight of the television drama year – but would this sequel be a letdown even so?     This is England ‘86 is uneven but it certainly wasn’t anti-climactic:  at its best, it’s streets ahead of any British picture I’ve seen in the cinema since the original This is England (the only challengers are the intervening Meadows films Somers Town and Le Donk & Scor-Zay-Zee).   This is England was set in 1983, the year after the Falklands War in which the adolescent hero Shaun’s father was killed.   TIE ‘86 takes place during the 1986 World Cup and culminates in the quarter-final between Argentina and England, the ‘Hand of God’ match.   (It’s interesting to hear Barry Davies’s commentary and be reminded that he at first thought the England players were claiming that Maradona was offside rather than had handled the ball.)   Many of the characters in the new film are familiar from the first one:  Shaun and his mother Cynthia, Woody, Lol, Milky, Smell (short for Michelle), Meggy, Gadget and, in a brief but compelling reappearance, Combo (who nearly killed Milky in a racist attack towards the end of the first film).   Meadows co-wrote the screenplay with Jack Thorne and directed the third and the last of the four episodes; the first two were directed by Tom Harper.

Meadows was probably not uninvolved in all the episodes so it’s probably unfair to Tom Harper to say that TIE ‘86 took time to find its feet and rhythm.   The first episode begins with Shaun doing his last CSE exam before leaving school and without a clue what to do next but it’s centred on Lol’s and Woody’s wedding day.  The marriage never happens:  Woody hesitates so long in answer to the registrar’s ‘Do you, Richard Woodhouse … ?’ that the ceremony gets interrupted by the news that Meggy has had a heart attack in the registry office toilets and the marriage party packs off to the hospital he’s now in.  Both here and in the second episode, comedy and serious sequences are more distinct than you expect in a Shane Meadows film, and the comedy bits – especially the set-tos between the main group of characters and a scooter-riding gang led by Flip (Perry Fitzpatrick) – don’t benefit from that.    But, in the second episode, the sexual complexities of the story – complexities within and between generations, which dominate the latter half of TIE ‘86 – start to emerge.   Lol’s father Mick has returned home and she’s horrified – to see him and to see her mother and younger sister Kelly welcome a man who, Lol insinuates, has previously sexually abused both Kelly and herself.   Frustrated by Woody’s performance at the registry office, Lol confides in their long-time mutual friend Milky (it turns out he’s always carried a torch for Lol) and starts having sex with him.  Shaun’s mother has got her son a job at the video store run by Mr Sandhu (Kriss Donsajh), the same man whose newsagent’s shop the racists trashed in This is England:  when he returns home to find them in bed together, Shaun is furious and disgusted and tells his mother she’s bringing shame on his father’s memory.  The cinema-inflected relationship between Gadget (Andrew Ellis) and the middle-aged seductress Trudy (Hannah Walters) – at one point she pretends she’s Mrs Robinson and he’s Benjamin – is meant to provide light relief but doesn’t work nearly as well as these other elements.   Meadows pretty well drops the comedy-only sequences in the third and fourth episodes.

This is the first time that Meadows has had a female protagonist and you sense some awkwardness in the new departure.  Lol is presented, from an early stage, as ‘different’ from (implicitly a cut above) the other girls in the group – to the extent that it’s not easy to accept her as mates with any of them (whereas in This is England Lol seemed to fit easily into the group).  This is partly because Vicky McClure is so distinctive – the short, side-parted blonde hair, her strong, beautiful eyes and bone structure – but also partly because of the way Lol is photographed and shown to have a reflective intelligence we don’t see in the others.  When Meadows uses Lol’s separateness explicitly, though, it works well – as when she joins the gang in the pub to watch the last of England’s three matches in the qualifying group, against Poland, and sits apart from the others, getting drunker and angrier.  (Woody is on a late shift at work and Lol’s affair with Milky is becoming strained by now.)  Vicky McClure is a less nuanced performer than some of the others here but she certainly draws the camera and effortlessly holds your attention.

Shaun and Woody are great characters:  you never get enough of them.  At first, I wasn’t sure if Thomas Turgoose, now a more experienced actor, hadn’t lost some of the instinctual brilliance he showed in This is England (and Somers Town) but I needn’t have worried.  If he’s slightly more self-conscious than he was in 2006, the gain is in his being able to shine in more complex sequences and Turgoose is still marvellously natural.  Shaun isn’t the central character here but, partly because we have such a strong connection with him from the first film and partly because Thomas Turgoose is so expressive as an observer of the events happening around him, he still seems the central consciousness.   Joe Gilgun had a wonderful eccentric decency as Woody in the the first film.  He’s become well known to a much larger audience since then as the ‘lovable rogue’ Eli Dingle in Emmerdale but the originality of his presence is undimmed.  It’s believable that, three years on, Woody has a steady if unexciting job (some kind of admin in a factory):  he’s changed his clothes from skinhead to mod but you can see that he’s divided between the past, which his friends seem more anchored in (largely through being unemployed) and the threat, represented by his parents, of a deadeningly conventional future.   You can also understand Woody’s unresolved feelings about Lol, in this scheme of things, because they go back a long way but intend to spend their lives together.   Milky too emerges as a major character this time around:  the impressive Andrew Shim gets, and takes, the opportunity to create a more rounded individual than was possible in the first film.

During the England-Poland game, Kelly’s friend Trev calls round for her and Mick, who’s alone in the house watching the match on television, invites her in.   Trev is soon and increasingly uneasy as Mick encourages her to stay and have a drink; within a few minutes, he’s refusing to let her go and soon after that he rapes her, in a sequence that’s remarkably sustained, believable and grim.  The following day, Trev tells Lol, swearing her to secrecy, and this leads to another gruelling scene in which Lol confronts her father.  He tries to rape her, she manages to reach for the hammer she’s already threatened him with and beats him to death.  At first, the pair go at each other verbally for some time – for too long:  this is one instance where the often improvised acting looks improvised because it’s artificial.  (It might have worked better if Mick had been sitting down, able to pretend for as long as he could that Lol was just being a nuisance:  their explicit physical confrontation of one another from the start of the scene is false.)  Then Lol produces the hammer.  Once she does, Mick of course overpowers and assaults her.  The questions in your mind come thick and fast.  What did Lol expect?  Did part of her want this to happen – had things got so bad that she wanted to make them even worse, as bad as they could get?  (Is she, in effect, trying to end her life?)   Once her father is yanking off her clothes, you stop asking these questions:  you want him to stop and you know the hammer that’s been knocked to the floor is Lol’s only hope.

You want Lol to kill her father – and I realised I wanted this not just so that she would be free of him but because he would cease to exist.  The character of Mick (frighteningly well played by Johnny Harris) gives a new charge to the term ‘sex maniac’:  you come to see that having sex, preferably with young girls (his daughters or their friends), is Mick’s way of life – and that it would be better for all concerned, including him, if that stopped.  Once the oral sparring ends and the physical violence starts, there’s music rather than voices on the soundtrack, and it continues until Mick is dead.  Meadows also slows down the camera speed when the hammer blows start.   This could be dismissed as a means of arty distancing, of presenting what Lol is experiencing as a-bad-dream-that’s-really-happening but I got the impression that it was an admission, one that made me admire Shane Meadows even more, of how hard he found it to do this sequence.  (It’s as if the director himself wants to pretend it’s not happening but knows he has to go through with it.)   I was less sure about the moment when Trev prepares to tell Lol about what’s happened and mouths, in slow motion, ‘He raped me’ with music playing.  Danielle Watson plays Trev beautifully but I wondered here if Meadows wanted to mask and abbreviate the scene because it ran the risk of cliché rather than because it might be too hard to take.

Powerful though the final episode of TIE ‘86 is, its dramatic shaping is excessive, and runs counter to the realism of Meadows’s style.  Woody’s impulsive determination to rearrange the wedding ceremony – as a surprise for Lol – is charmingly played by Joe Gilgun but the gathering of the gang at the registry office is too obvious a counterpoint to (although it’s an admittedly welcome break from) what’s actually happening to Lol.  For reasons unclear, Combo, who’s just been to visit his mother (he knew she was dying but arrives to learn that she’s died), then turns up outside Lol’s mother’s house.  Through the window he sees Mick lying on the floor and comes in to find the traumatised Lol crouched near her father’s body.  Combo’s tattoos include a small cross and we’ve just seen him tearfully speak lines from the Lord’s Prayer by his mother’s corpse.  What he does at the crime scene, however, is Catholic melodrama that seems to come out of a different kind of film, old Hollywood or perhaps a Scorsese movie.  Combo prays ‘Let me do a good thing’:  he wipes the hammer, puts his own fingerprints on it, and shakes Mick’s head against his body to leave fibres on it.

The closing sequence of episode four shows Combo quietly, gratefully going into custody, charged with the manslaughter of Mick.   Stephen Graham, who plays Combo, has had a very different kind and level of success from the others in This is England in the years since 2006.  He played Baby Face Nelson in Public Enemies; he’s now Al Capone in the HBO series Boardwalk Empire, the first episode of which was directed by Martin Scorsese (who is also an executive producer of the series).  It’s almost as if Meadows, in what he has happen to Combo, is making an ironic comment on Stephen Graham’s transatlantic celebrity.  In spite of the floridness of the idea, Graham brings off these scenes with great skill (especially the sequence in his mother’s flat) and it’s to Meadows’s credit that he’s keen to show there’s more to Combo’s mental fragility than we might have guessed from the charismatic National Front nutcase of This is England.  (Although we might have guessed it from the outstanding scene between Lol and Combo in the first film, where we fear for her safety but, to our astonishment, witness his defeat and emotional disintegration.)  Meadows is confidently non-emphatic in showing us how the characters have changed between 1983 and 1986.   Meggy (Perry Benson) isn’t an interesting individual but it is interesting to remember that, although he’s a comic figure here, he was one of the gang that ran riot in Mr Sandhu’s shop in This is England.  (It was Meggy who defecated in the shop.)

There’s a surprising weakness in TIE ‘86.  The England-Argentina match is both a suitable conclusion and resonant with the original film but Meadows’s use of the World Cup is, occasionally, surprisingly utilitarian and unconvincing.  There are England flags flying from houses and the England games are important social events but the results don’t seem to matter enough to the people in the story.  Perhaps the other difficult things going on in their worlds are making the point that there’s more to life than football – that’s horrifically illustrated when Mick rapes Trev and the drunken Combo crashes into Shaun’s mother’s living room during the Poland match.  But I thought that at least some of the characters needed to invest more hope in, and experience more elation or disappointment at the outcome of, the World Cup matches.  It’s not convincing that Shaun is so ready to make out with Smell in the pub toilets during the England-Argentina game or that Lol, Woody, Milky, Trev and Kelly play cards with the same match going on in the background.

Last November, Shane Meadows, talking about this new project, was quoted in The Guardian as follows:

‘Not only did I want to take the story of the gang [from This is England] broader and deeper, I also saw in the experiences of the young in 1986 many resonances to now – recession, lack of jobs, sense of the world at a turning point. …’

One of Meadows’s great merits is that, while you’re continuously aware of the particular social contexts of his stories and their political implications, he never makes these over-explicit.  The people in his films are shaped considerably by circumstance but they’re always people, never mouthpieces.  In the best sequences in This is England ‘86 (and they do mostly occur in the two episodes that he directed), the fusion of different registers achieved by Meadows is something rare in British films.   And these sequences are not in short supply.  There’s the heart-to-heart between Woody and Milky, shortly after the latter has started sleeping with Lol; and, in spite of the fact that it triggers the unlikely attempt to resurrect the wedding ceremony, a lovingly aggressive exchange between the same pair in the last episode.   There’s the scene, when the affair with Milky is over, in which Lol, without telling him what happened, apologises to Woody and he apologises to her for making her unhappy:  the emotional truth and richness of the conversation is tremendous – and scored by noise from Woody’s pet parrot, which seems to function almost as a symbol of how exasperating Woody must be to live with.  (According to Wikipedia, this is actually Joe Gilgun’s much-loved parrot – which has the great name of Ian and which interrupted filming by going missing at one point.  Also according to Wikipedia, Gilgun and Vicky McClure are currently real-life partners – and McClure has previously dated Andrew Shim.  I would normally say:  they’re actors – so what?  But when you see the degree of trust this trio have in each other on screen, you can’t help feeling the off-screen connections may be part of that trust.)

The morning-after sequence of Combo at Shaun’s home is superb too.  Combo, his head bloodstained, sleeps a deep sleep on the settee. Shaun and Smell have spent the night side by side on the other components of Cynthia’s three-piece suite.  After Shaun’s worried mother (Jo Hartley, excellent again) leaves for work, Shaun tries anxiously but uneasily to send Combo on his way.   When Combo tells him that he’s come back to the area because his mother is dying, Shaun seems both shocked and irritated that he hasn’t now got an unequivocally good reason for wanting to see the back of Combo.  Tentatively, he asks Combo if he wants to clean up.  He then gets some of his father’s clothes, which we would expect Shaun to regard as sacrosanct, to lend Combo.  The moment when Shaun takes the clothes through to the bathroom is perfectly understated by Thomas Turgoose:  he doesn’t stare at the clothes as if they were holy relics – he just sniffs them for a moment.  While we’re on the subject of olfactory highlights, it should be said that Turgoose is splendidly partnered by Rosamund Hanson as Smell.  Her extraordinary looks and throttled voice, and the confidence Shane Meadows seems to have instilled in her since the first film, allow Hanson to play the role completely straight and true, and come over as both bizarre and affectingly loyal.  Other youngsters who make a good impression are Chanel Cresswell (Kelly) and Michael Socha (he must be Lauren’s brother) as her boyfriend Harvey.  Like This is England, the soundtrack includes music by the Italian minimalist composer Ludovico Einaudi and, as expected, an imaginative and evocative selection of 80s hits.  The closing credits are accompanied, memorably (I confidently predict), by the Jam’s ‘The Bitterest Pill’.

September 2010