This Town, review: Steven Knight’s heartfelt ode to 2 tone and the Midlands is something special
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This Town (BBC One) opens with a line of poetry, delivered in a Brummie accent. “I love you baby. I can’t quite say it/But if I had a harp, I’d bloody play it.” It sets the tone perfectly. Steven Knight’s new drama is a love letter: to 2 Tone and ska, to the Birmingham and Coventry of his youth, and to youth itself with all its possibilities, heartbreak and comedy.
The year is 1981, and would-be poet Dante (Levi Brown) accidentally wanders into a riot in Handsworth. In his duffle coat, he’s more Paddington Bear than street fighter. But this is inner city Birmingham, and trouble is never far away. Over in Coventry, Bardon (Ben Rose) is being commandeered into helping his IRA dad raise funds for the cause. And, in Belfast, Dante’s brother, Gregory (Jordan Bolger), is on the Lower Falls Road dodging bullets and listening to birdsong.
Dante and Gregory are black, and Bardon is white, but it turns out that they’re cousins. A funeral brings them together, and a love for music binds them.
The BBC has billed this as “both a high-octane thriller and a family saga”, which is a bit misleading. Yes, there are moments of tension with the IRA’s activities, but it’s not a thriller. Go into it with those expectations and you’ll likely find it a bit slow. Knight has stuck to his guns and developed the story at his own pace. At a time when TV executives demand that every episode of a drama must be filled with attention-grabbing scenes and end on a cliffhanger, This Town is wilfully different.
This is a world of dilapidated council estates and street riots, and yet it’s not horribly bleak. Like his characters, Knight finds hope and lyrical beauty in the everyday. “I’m closer to heaven on floor 27 because I can see the M6,” is one of Dante’s lines of poetry, which sounds less Adrian Mole on screen than it appears on paper. Later, he tells someone: “A girl at my college said people like us don’t write poetry. I said Joan Armatrading songs are poetry and she’s from Wolverhampton, which is an even worse s—hole than here.”
Knight knows this world well, having grown up in the West Midlands. His writing is smart about the confines of class and family expectation. Dante is talked out of his crush on “some middle-class girl who will go on to become a surveyor or an estate agent and who wouldn’t look trash like us when she reaches 21”.
The drama has its weaknesses. Knight, creator of Peaky Blinders (and last year’s terrible adaptation of Great Expectations, which should be consigned to Room 101) can’t help returning to his happy place, which is men being threatening in dark rooms. This Town could easily have done without a nasty nightclub boss who runs a drugs business and punishes underlings by making them choke on severed fingers.
There are a fair few violent scenes; when called upon to have a scrap, Dante turns out to have skills that wouldn’t disgrace Cassius Clay, to whom he bears a passing resemblance. The rest of the time, Brown imbues him with a solemn, soulful quality, in an impressive performance for a young actor only three years out of drama school.
You will care about the three central characters of Dante, Bardon and Gregory but, with the exception of Michelle Dockery as Brandon’s loving but chaotic mother – a role which utilises her talents as a singer – the women here feel like after-thoughts. Knight is just much better at men.
This Town begins on Easter Sunday at 9pm on BBC One
