My last couple of posts (on Ping and The American) were rather harsh, so this time instead I am going to write about something that I have fallen in love with – Shane Meadow’s 4-part drama This is England ’86 broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK. This series, which follows a group of friends making the difficult transition from adolescence to adulthood in Thatcherite Britain, is a continuation of the characters first introduced in Meadow’s breakthrough 2006 film This is England. Using the same actors playing the same characters, the series picks up 3 years after the film ended. Whereas in the film the gang of friends were proud skinheads, they have grown up a bit and are less fully devoted to the subculture that defined their youth. Despite these superficial changes, they maintain their fun-loving, strength through adversity attitudes. Furthermore, while the film tended to focus on racial issues (specifically the division between the original style skinheads and racist skinheads), the series really branches out and looks into a range social issues of the mid-1980s.
Only three-quarters of the way through the series Meadows has already explored issues as varied as marriage, love, death, poverty, loss, rape, unemployment, infidelity, domestic violence and child molestation. Yet, the fact that characters deal with these issues simultaneously is believable – not only possible, but fully plausible. The lives of the characters in This is England/This is England ’86 are not full of sunshine and tulips – they are anything but. Their prospects are bleak, their pasts are dark and like the generations that came before them they are searching for ways to cope. Sometimes they do the wrong thing, but surprisingly frequently they try to do the right one. Refreshingly, unlike so much of so-called realist television and film this coping (at least at this point) hasn’t involved drug addiction (because not every single person with a difficult life becomes a drug addict). Most of the time they are able to find solace in each other – in football games, impromptu parties, watching television at the pub – and when they can’t they have the good sense to realize they need to find it in themselves.
This is not pretty television. It isn’t Degrassi or Coronation Street. The problems that these characters face will not be wrapped up by the end of the series. They may never be wrapped up. This is a snapshot more than a narrative – like all things there is a beginning, but there isn’t a clear-cut middle or end. This is real life – loose ends, abrupt changes, driftings apart and coalescences. These characters don’t ask for your sympathy not because they are afraid of vulnerability but because they don’t want it. They are not victims of their circumstances but humans with agency and autonomy. They do not define themselves by the craziness that surrounds them but by their response to it.
What I particularly love about This is England ’86 is that it has been able to really explore the whole core gang of friends, rather than follow a single character, as the film did with Shaun. In fact, as we find out at the beginning of the first installment, Shaun hasn’t been part of the group since the end of the film and it is only as the series develops does he rejoin the fold. But, just as in real life, the fit is never quite as it had been before. Where the film constructs Shaun as a character worthy of sympathy above and beyond the others, the series knocks Shaun right off that pedestal by revealing that his life is really no worse, nor any better, than those of the rest of the gang. Everyone is in the same leaky boat, and they all need to work equally hard to keep it afloat.
I know that Meadows has been attacked by some film critics and individuals who see themselves as cultural connoisseurs for following up his critically acclaimed film on television screens. They imply that he is lowering himself (because in their world television is film’s cheap and broken younger sibling) and polluting the form among other things, though their thinly veiled core complaint is that he is making excellent film material which is accessible to the masses. There is a certain irony in their criticism, and this is part of the reason why I am so supportive of Meadows decision to follow up with Channel 4.
This is England is a film about the populous, the working class. It is a film about those people for whom going to the cinema (even without getting popcorn) is a treat not a routine. It is about the type of people who in the 1980s would have been watching the excellent films being made by and aired on Channel 4 – films like My Beautiful Laundrette (Stephen Frears, 1985) and Distant Voices Still Lives (Terence Davies, 1988) which have gone on to become cult classics the world over. In a way, the only logical next step for Meadows was to bring This is England to television, to where its characters would have lived and to where those who identify with them still do. Though I like a good piece of cinema as much as the next former film student, I like a good story more and this is what Meadows is working with here – a story too good not to be told to everyone. I only hope that more filmmakers will follow his footsteps and reinvigorate the substance of filmmaking over coming years, even if it might mean a few minor sacrifices in form.
That I highly recommend watching this series is likely quite obvious by now, but I would also recommend that you watch the film before the series as it really does give you the overview of who everyone is and how they relate to one another (it is also a fantastic film in its own right). Great job Shane Meadows, cast, crew and Channel 4. I can’t wait to see what you have in store for the finale next week.
Film Trailer:
This is England ’86 Promo:
