This Is England '86

This is one of the best UK TV dramas in years. Shane Meadows and his team have really went all out. With each episode getting more and more grittier and complex for the characters than the last. Some of the sequences were not only atmospheric but deeply observed and put you right into the time and era of England, but also the characters dilemmas. I want to see more of this quality on our TV's but it would be too much to expect such a quality show every week. I respect that this kind of quality takes months and in many cases years to put together. I love Shane Meadows and I think that he deserves a huge break now. He has surpassed himself with this show. Brilliant.

I'm an ex-pat Brit living in the us.

and i can tell you most American viewers wouldn't last past five minutes into this show.

the cast is below average in looks, some are deformed, they talk funny; the characters are a mixture of the depressed, depraved, the thick and the stupid. the acting can only be described as a work in progress, and they lead dead end lives in dead end places. there ain't no glamor here.

all this will repel viewers whose identity is cast by fashion and t.v. programming. this show could never find a spot anytime on a us network. episode four would send middle America into a terminal tale spin--but it's not their fault. we don't get this kind of material because the money men who run us television only care about the cash--the baby faced producers would say, "who wants to watch a show about ugly losers?".

and if you want to hold up PBS as a daring non-commercial network, then drink some more koolaid. their emphasis is Lawrence welk for the primary, grey haired donors, and pimping a brainwashing liberal agenda through their political programming. they might find the balls to show a program like this around the 23rd century.

but i love it.

the original film, and this following series, seems to take a cast of mostly inexperienced actors, who may have lived the parts, and coaches them through a working class reality which at its core is full of camaraderie, loyalty, forgiveness and love. not the prettified sitcom love, but a love grown through lifelong community and shared pain, a love of real sacrifice.

these people are flawed like the rest of us, but they are not us. at first we reject their world as alien, but we see, through time, they share all our fears and traumas. we too are all common.

and thank god someone is making something about real people.

the great shame is: only a few Americans will ever see this show. we need to raise the bar, and flush out the cobwebbed hierarchy at PBS. i just hope we don't have to wait until the 23rd century for our programming to catch up. i don't think i can wait that long.

The father/son element took on contemporary resonance in the earlier work: its exposition made clear that Shaun was fatherless due to his father being killed whilst serving in the Falklands War, and though grossly misguided, Combo's anti-war rant to Shaun provokes a great anger and frustration in the youngster because of its essential truths – that the war itself was being fought under false pretences, fed to tame the same working classes that Margaret Thatcher had openly waged war on. The film's release, at a time in which the UK was once again involved in an escalating imperialist war – this time in both Iraq and Afghanistan – gave it an extra political edge.

This material, even in the hands of a limited cinematic storyteller such as Shane Meadows, proved quite powerful at points. Meadows himself apparently saw much further potential in the work: "When I finished This Is England, I had a wealth of material and unused ideas that I felt very keen to take further," he said in August 2009. "Not only did I want to take the story of the gang 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. Whereas the film told part of the story, the TV serial will tell the rest." Though these sentiments ring true for the film, the mini-series, we should say before anything else, is a mostly vacant work, with no significant attention paid to a recession, to unemployment, to a sense of political and social upheaval. If the central relationship between Combo and Shaun offered a potentially rich examination of political disillusionment amongst the young in both the England of the Eighties and of the present day, its television follow-up, co-scripted with Meadows by Jack Thorne, makes an industry out of fashionable miserablism, forced humour and a moral viewpoint that can only be described as confused at best.

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You won't be disappointed by this sequel and continues the story . A must see .

Just finished re-watching This Is England '86 and I completely forgot how utterly brilliant it is. I've laughed and cried, just raw emotion throughout. Ludovico Einaudi's scores made the series truly magnificent. Such a phenomenal bit of telly - 10/10. If you haven't seen this, watch it followed by '88 and '90 and if you have seen them, watch them again!