Shane Meadows (2011)

A technical hitch with the recording meant we missed the first of the three episodes.  The second and third are set on, respectively, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day 1988.   The characters’ lives are pretty bleak now:  although there’s plenty of humour and wit, the dominant mood is miserable and the dominant theme is trauma.  Lol and Woody have broken up and are failing to create new lives without each other.   Shaun is doing a drama course at college but his appearance in a play is overshadowed by his being unfaithful – with another student – to Michelle.  This is England ‘86 moved gradually towards the climactic confrontation between Lol and her father and, while this wasn’t among the finest sequences (those were the much richer scenes involving the complex triangle of Lol, Woody and Milky), Lol’s killing of her father was the most immediately powerful part of TIE ‘86 and it has turned out to be the most memorable.  (Vicky McClure won a BAFTA for her performance as Lol and you know this sequence was the reason she won.)  TIE ’86 was much the best TV drama I saw in 2010; that wasn’t because it was unusually dark material for television although it certainly was that too.  There are signs in TIE ’88, however, that Shane Meadows is beginning to think that going deeper and getting grimmer are the same thing.  This latest piece includes what are virtual arias of agony – an impression underlined by the various sacred music Meadows uses to score the action. This includes not only classical music but also Christmas carols, which naturally have an emotional effect and underline the characters’ distance from joy.

Although I feel some unease about Shane Meadows’ newfound solemnity, there are plenty of reasons for looking at This is England ’88 more positively.  It’s very credible that the principals are marked – if not for life then certainly for the next few years of their lives – by what happened in 1986 and its psychological aftermath.   Meadows’ maturity as a film-maker enables him to keep using humour as both a counterpoint to, and a reminder of, the characters’ unhappiness (in a way his friend Paddy Considine wasn’t able to do in Tyrannosaur).  And then, quite simply, there are those characters, of whom you never tire.  The main actors – Vicky McClure, Joe Gilgun, Thomas Turgoose, Stephen Graham, Andrew Shim and Rosamund Hanson – have followed widely varying paths since the original This is England cinema film five years ago; they return to their roles here as if knowing the people they’re playing better and more deeply than before – with the help of some very good writing by Meadows and Jack Thorne.  There are wonderful new characters and performances too – Helen Behan as a Catholic nurse whose religious belief Meadows appears to regard as a mystery but with respect (as the nurse herself accepts the mystery of her faith), Stacey Sampson as Woody’s new girlfriend Jennifer, who is understanding in more ways than one.  Joe Gilgun’s Woody is still my favourite character.  In TIE ’88, Woody’s doing well at his office job and on the verge of a promotion – he and Jennifer get taken out by the boss and his girlfriend for a slap-up dinner on Christmas Eve.  Gilgun’s knife-edge between cracking jokes and losing it at the restaurant is stunningly good – we see how emphatically good-humoured Woody needs to be in order to keep the bad feelings down.  Then, on the way home, he and Jennifer meet Milky and some of the others from the old gang; the aggression in Woody’s humour breaks out as purely aggression.  As usual, watching Gilgun, Vicky McClure and the others is moving for me not just because their characters’ situations are moving but because their acting is so very good.

January 2012