CHRISTOPHER STEVENS: If this is what the 1980s were really like, maybe they’re best forgotten!
This city
Teenagers, do not under any circumstances keep your diaries and journals as you grow up. Bin them. If you don’t, you will undoubtedly experience excruciating shame one day. . . read your teenage poetry to someone.
Few things can be more blood-curdling. It’s bad enough if your mother discovered these verses when you were seventeen. How much worse would it be if your own children found them thirty years later?
One can only feel sorry for Dante (Levi Brown), whose inner poetic voice provides the narration for This Town (BBC1), a coming-of-age drama set amid the early aughts ska music scene of Birmingham and Coventry eighty.
“I love you baby, I can’t quite say it / If I had a heart I’d fucking play it,” he recites inwardly, as he lounges heartbrokenly through the streets of Handsworth after a girl at university accepts his plea for a date had rejected.
Michelle Dockery stars as Estella in This Town. The coming-of-age drama is set in the ska music scene of Birmingham and Coventry in the early 1980s.
Dockery with co-star Ben Rose who plays Brandon Quinn. Steven Knight, the 65-year-old creator of Peaky Blinders, has intended this six-part drama to be a loving celebration of the West Midlands
As he drifts into a street riot, with cars on fire and rocks flying, the doggerel continues: “Before I saw you, I didn’t know. But now I discover that I am not a bad poet.’
Luckily at this point someone throws a petrol bomb in Dante’s direction. You can’t say he didn’t deserve it.
Steven Knight, the 65-year-old creator of Peaky Blinders, intends the six-part drama to be a loving celebration of the West Midlands, where he spent his teenage years. He has some funny ideas about nostalgia; what he remembers most fondly is the violence and crime. That explains why he revered his fictional gangster clan, the Shelbys.
Dante’s brother Gregory (Jordan Bolger) is embroiled in another riot on Belfast’s Falls Road. Both young men are daydreamers, with a tendency to forget about fighting and listen to birdsong instead.
Meanwhile, their cousin Michael, a champion Riverdancer in the insular Irish community of Coventry, is drawn into IRA activities by his leather-clad father, Eamonn (Peter McDonald), who is more interested in the money-making potential of organized terror than the bombings. .
Dockery and Rose in this town. There is a strong soundtrack by Desmond Dekker, UB40, Toots and the Maytals and other reggae acts from that era
You might feel, with some justification, that the troubled home lives of terrorists and their families is a questionable choice for a BBC drama. However, Knight does a good job of portraying the moral complexity of lives embroiled in violent crime without always glorifying it (though he certainly does at times).
Dante, Gregory and Michael all love music, and there’s a strong soundtrack from Desmond Dekker, UB40, Toots and the Maytals and other reggae acts of the era.
There are flashes of bitter humor, too: a riot girl setting her gasoline-soaked sleeve on fire as she lights a joint, children laughing as a squad points its gun at them and shouts, “Bang-bang!”
But if this is the best nostalgia 1981 has to offer, maybe it’s best forgotten.