mon 25/11/2024

This is England '86, Channel 4 | reviews, news & interviews

This is England '86, Channel 4

This is England '86, Channel 4

Shane Meadows hits the small screen

Wedding belles: Kelly, Smell and Lol bus it to the registry office

For hundreds of thousands of people watching Shane Meadows’s TV debut last night, an updating (by three years) of the director’s skinhead movie, This is England (2006), the opening episode may well have been their first experience of a "Shane Meadows film". What will they have made of it? Because I’m not sure whether it was exactly a Shane Meadows film, or whether it was a Shane Meadows pastiche or a Shane Meadows homage - "in the style of". For last night’s episode was co-written with Skins regular Jack Thorne and directed by someone else completely, Tom Harper (The Scouting Book for Boys). You could call it a dilution of the brand.

For hundreds of thousands of people watching Shane Meadows’s TV debut last night, an updating (by three years) of the director’s skinhead movie, This is England (2006), the opening episode may well have been their first experience of a "Shane Meadows film". What will they have made of it? Because I’m not sure whether it was exactly a Shane Meadows film, or whether it was a Shane Meadows pastiche or a Shane Meadows homage - "in the style of". For last night’s episode was co-written with Skins regular Jack Thorne and directed by someone else completely, Tom Harper (The Scouting Book for Boys). You could call it a dilution of the brand.

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gerard ... a few weeks on ... your thoughts? I thought the grit came back ... didn't disappoint

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