This Is England '90 Is an Essential, Alternative Vision of England

For the English among us, seeing Louisiana in True Detective’s first season was almost akin to casting eyes over an alien landscape. Whilst the show’s sophomore year took viewers to the more familiar screen territory of sunny California, Season One offered a look at a place screens big and small typically ignore: hot swamp, lonely green fields, ghost towns lit up by a fiery sun. America, like Britain, tends to portray itself a certain way; across the Atlantic, we’re aware there’s more to the States than New York, LA, San Francisco, and Vegas, it’s just a lot of the time we don’t see much of it. Similarly, over our way, we prefer our TV and film exports to stick largely to London and the English countryside—the gleaming, ever-ballooning capital and the beauteously verdant Olde England, respectively.

Of course, you—like most of us in Britain—probably don’t believe that all there is to see is that which is portrayed on-screen. Obviously in the UK, it’s not all City living or taking tea in stately homes. But even though England may fit comfortably inside the state of Texas, within our relatively compact realm there are still places that home-grown film and television rarely find room for. The This Is England saga—a series of shows you might recognize the name of, only because the title was taken from the acclaimed 2007 film that spawned it—makes an exception. Far from London, there’s England’s less glamorous Midlands and northern counties, areas where creator/writer/director Shane Meadows decided to locate this masterpiece of television.

In the UK, Meadows’ kitchen-sink soap opera—divided into three seasons, This Is England ’86, ’88, and ’90—was enormously successful, water cooler TV in the traditional sense, and a trending topic for people looking to share their by-turns joyful/weepy/horrified reactions. In the UK, we treated it as landmark programming. In the US, the series has never even been aired. It’s not exactly difficult to understand why that might be: there’s not much about the show that’s easy. From the occasionally impenetrably-accented stars, to the dour surroundings, home to storylines dealing in graphic rape and murder, this is stuff that even we in the UK found difficult to watch.

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A social-realist drama that’s heavily improvised and shot in a docu-style, the This Is England saga—which recently finished its run in the UK—locates itself amidst the run-down housing estates and crumbling abandoned buildings you won’t see on any postcards. It’s a tale of a group of young people stuck in a place and a wage bracket by mere accident of birth, with Margaret Thatcher more than anyone the principle villain (her damaging legacy is in each glum face and grim townscape that clearly had its soul removed under her reign). It presents the kind of image the country doesn’t want to promote, the kind that the current Prime Minister probably tries to convince himself never existed and doesn’t still exist today.

The title may imply that the show offers some microcosm portrayal of the entire country, but This Is England is more specific than that. Like the film it span off from, This Is England isn’t a show about the inherited wealth set. (The likes of Downton Abbey may imply otherwise, but in reality hardly any of us benefited from centuries of aristocratic rule and colonial plundering.) The whole saga is set in a cash-strapped town located between Nottingham and Manchester, where the accents range from Mancunian, to Scouse, to Black Country dialect. Wherever this town is, it’s a melting pot of English society’s undervalued. It almost looks like an allegorical place thought up by Meadows, in an attempt to educate outsiders on how England’s working classes live and have lived.

Through his characters, all of whom age in real-time (the show was shot in three separate intervals over six years), Meadows explores some of the most troubling aspects of lesser-known recent English history. The show touches upon racial division, the Falklands War, the country’s enduring relationship with far-right ideology. It looks at how culture in the country dramatically changed from 1986 to 1990, as its group of vibrant, funny youths shift from being skinheads, to Mods and New Romantics, and finally to Ecstasy-powered ravers and Goths. It’s a show about the disenchantment of the working class in a country that today is again beginning to abandon them.

This Is England isn’t the whole picture of the period it depicts, nor would every Englander have found modern parallels in the show. But for so many in the UK, it says more about them and their lives than any number of cockney crime dramas or stuffy period pieces ever could. That was part of the appeal for many of those who tuned in. Though ultimately the key appeal must have been that it was such fine television—the most personal project of one of the best contemporary British filmmakers—starring one of the greatest TV ensembles in recent memory. As compelling and eye-opening as the surprising dark heart of America was to Brits who watched True Detective, so This Is England’s alternative vision of England will prove to viewers in the US.

Now you just have to find it.

This Is England ’90 Is an Essential, Alternative Vision of England