Shane Meadows (2015)

Since Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee in 2009, Shane Meadows has made only one film for theatrical release, a 2013 documentary about the Stone Roses.  This is England ‘90 is the third television drama serial by Meadows to appear since Le Donk.  It’s another fine piece of work but, as I watched, I couldn’t help regretting that he’d not made more for cinema in recent years.  The first sight of Meadows’s regular actors in the latest This is England (TIE) was also a pleasure tinged with sadness:  while Vicky McClure, Joe Gilgun and especially Stephen Graham have worked regularly and fruitfully with others, we’ve not seen much of Thomas Turgoose or Andrew Shim in non-Meadows projects. TIE ’90, like TIE ’86, comprised four episodes (TIE ’88 was three episodes only).  Each of the first three ran sixty minutes; this time, the concluding episode ran ninety.  Jack Thorne, who shared the writing credit with Meadows on ’86 and ’88, does so again.

The original This is England film was set in 1983, the year of the post-Falklands election and the high watermark of Margaret Thatcher’s personal popularity.  TIE ’90 was billed as the last in the cycle and, if it proves to be, that will make sense for a number of reasons, including that 1990 saw Mrs Thatcher’s departure from Downing Street.  This is one of a miscellany of news stories shown in short clips of archive footage at the start of TIE ’90 but the drama that follows – with each episode named for a season of the year – doesn’t rely on or refer to events taking place outside the characters’ personal lives, not even that summer’s World Cup in Italy, where England reached the semi-finals. This marks a change from TIE ’86, in which England’s World Cup matches were a significant plot element but it’s been a consistent strength of TIE that Shane Meadows hasn’t much depended on, or made facile use of, big news stories of the day to evoke the time in which his films  are set.  The characters are vivid, eloquent illustrations of the impact of government policies but Meadows has always been more concerned with exploring human relationships than in making political points.

The naturalistic acting in Meadows’s work and our increasing familiarity, over the years, with the main TIE characters combine to make us feel we’re interested in them almost as real people – so that watching them interact is enough and conventional dramatic incident in their lives is of secondary importance.  Even so, you keep wondering what newcomers will make of Shaun, Lol, Woody, Combo, Milky and others.  Part of you puts yourself in the position of a TIE virgin:  from that perspective, I found the new serial, like TIE ’86, took time – the whole of ‘Spring’ and the first half of ‘Summer’ – to get going as a drama.   Any doubts about whether Meadows had much left to say were disposed of in ‘Autumn’.  Lol and Woody, with Combo about to be released on parole from his prison sentence for manslaughter,  invite all those closest to them to a meal at their home and Lol reveals the truth about her father’s death (in TIE ’86).  This long sequence is brilliantly sustained and deeply distressing.  Later scenes in ‘Autumn’, when Combo comes to stay with Lol and Woody, are marvellous in a more subtly affecting and desolating way.  Looking back at my notes on TIE ’86 and TIE ’88, I can only repeat myself in summing up TIE ’90:   the best things in it – and, by the end, they are many – are in a league of their own compared with any other new television drama I’ve seen this year (although much of Unforgotten is very good).

In the finale of ‘Winter’ especially, I got the sense that Shane Meadows didn’t want to say goodbye to his characters and to the people playing them.  Nor do we.  The principal actors – I mean Gilgun, Graham, McClure, Shim, Turgoose – are as good as they’ve always been.  Plenty of others come through too:  I thought Michael Socha (Harvey) better than ever.  There are occasional ‘dramatic’ situations that aren’t believable:  in the final episode, these included the instant repairing of hurt feelings after the spectacularly disastrous planning meeting for Lol’s and Woody’s wedding; and the blatantly artificial delay, until late on at the wedding reception, in Lol’s asking Milky if he can shed any light on Combo’s mystifying disappearance.  But the acting and direction overcome even these relatively weak sections.  Shane Meadows’s affection for the people he’s created was reflected in TIE ’90 in his almost straining to give them happy endings but he has too much integrity as a film-maker to ignore what can’t be resolved.  He clearly feels the racial violence legacy of the original This is England isn’t susceptible to the kind of catharsis that he and his audience would love to see.  The very ending of This is England ’90 is rightly dark but the darkness is leavened with compassion.  Meadows remains determined – as he has been throughout this magnificent tetralogy – to avoid simply pinning the blame for mayhem and misery caused to others on particular individuals.

September-October 2015