This is England

http://www.thisisenglandmovie.co.uk/

Peter Bradshaw The Guardian, Friday 27 April 2007 Article history
Cutting edge... Shane Meadows' This is England
Shane Meadows continues his fast and fluent film-making career with this quasi-autobiographical picture about skinheads: a movie with hints of Alan Clarke's Made in Britain and, in its final image, the haunted disenchantment of Truffaut's The 400 Blows. It is a sad, painful and sometimes funny story from the white working classes of 1980s Britain, the cannon-fodder caste alienated from Falklands rejoicing on the home front and not invited to participate in the nation's promised service-economy prosperity.

This Is EnglandProduction year: 2006Country: UKCert (UK): 18Runtime: 100 minsDirectors: Shane MeadowsCast: Jo Hartley, Jo Hartley, Joe Gilgun, Stephen Graham, Thomas TurgooseMore on this filmMeadows boldly attempts to reclaim the skinhead from the traditional neo-Nazi image, explicitly distinguishing his characters from a separate racist influence, and presenting them as an anarchic youth tribe that idolised West Indian music. He sees their susceptibility to the extremist right as a poignant and even tragic part of their fatherless culture, literally and figuratively orphaned by the times.

There's a winning lead performance from 13-year-old newcomer Thomas Turgoose playing a put-upon lad called Shaun in the run-down Grimsby of 1983. His dad was a serviceman killed in the Falklands and he's perennially getting picked on for this, and for his horrible flared jeans which make him look, as one bully cruelly puts it, like Keith Chegwin's son. Sloping and moping his way home after a standard-issue school day of humiliation, Shaun gets waylaid by some skins in a dodgy underpass, but instead of yet more battering, the gang give him sympathy and understanding; they become Shaun's only friends, and with a new Ben Sherman shirt and number one cut, Shaun has new pride and a new identity.

The gang's leader is Woody - a cheerful, sparky performance from Joe Gilgun - and they have an African-Caribbean member facetiously nicknamed Milky, played by Meadows regular Andrew Shim; Shaun even finds romance with one of the group's girl-punk fellow travellers: a languid and rather elegant older woman called Smell (Rosamund Hanson) who earnestly explains to Shaun's mum that she is called that simply because it rhymes with Michelle. The idyll is soon destroyed with the highly unwelcome appearance of Combo, a ferocious and sinister skin warrior just out of prison, played by Stephen Graham. He demands the group join his National Front cell, and turn out for an NF meeting in a tatty pub, addressed by one of the movement's suit-wearing officer class, played in cameo by Frank Harper.

Turgoose is the picture's heart and soul, and it's a terrifically natural, easy and commanding performance. Turgoose's open face radiates charm, and then, when he goes over to the dark side of racism, a creepy, anti-cherubic scorn: almost like one of the little blond kids in Village of the Damned. But Meadows is always concerned to preserve a sympathetic core to Shaun, and in fact to all the skins. Even the deeply objectionable Combo is shown to be suffering from emotional pain.

Like Meadows' earlier pictures, Dead Man's Shoes and A Room for Romeo Brass, This Is England is about younger, vulnerable figures being taken under the wing of older, flawed men, and this personal theme here finds its richest and maturest expression yet. As to whether we should buy its implied leniency about skinhead culture: that is another question. The West Indian influence is advanced as proof that skins were not necessarily racist: yet it can't cancel out Combo's hate campaign against South Asians, the "Pakis" who "smell of curry", a campaign which goes quite unchallenged or even unremarked upon by any of the skins, good or bad.

The skinhead identity is, after all, obviously supposed to be more aggressive than that of other tribes: I remember as a 10-year-old cowering on the terraces of Watford football club in the early 70s, as the Luton boot boys got stuck in, and my father grimly telling me that the reason they shaved their heads that way was so the coppers couldn't grab them by the hair. Whether or not that is true, it certainly made the wearer's head look like a big, third clenched fist. And it's still difficult to get a handle on them.

Meadows appears to want to find emotional truths behind the bravado, to find reasons for the male rage. It's a valid quest, and there are telling and touching moments, particularly between Turgoose and Rosamund Hanson. I found myself wishing that their love story could occupy more of the film, maybe for the same reason that the Shane Meadows film I have enjoyed most is the one his real fans loathe: the comedy Once Upon a Time in the Midlands. But from the get-go of this drama, it is obvious that things are heading only one way: towards a climactic flourish of violence, and it's a glum business wondering to whom and from whom this is going to happen. This is a violent subject, and these are violent people, and yet I couldn't help feeling that Meadows is, as so often, more comfortable with machismo than with the humour and gentleness which play a smaller, yet intensely welcome part of his movies. However agnostic I confess to still feeling about his work, there's no doubt that Meadows is a real film-maker with a growing and evolving career, and with his own natural cinematic language. When I think of his films, I think, for good or ill: this is English cinema.

Recommended books

D. Hebdige  Subculture: The meaning of Style

R. Murphy (Ed) British Cinema of the 90s  

Introduction to Section B

G325 Section B: Contemporary Media Issues

Section requirements
One question to be answered from six topics. Two questions offered for each six topic. 50 marks for the question. 1 hour to complete.
You must understand contemporary media texts, industries, audiences and debates.
You need to write academically about perspectives in media and culture, referencing examples, theories and arguments.
Understanding of contemporary issues must contain reference to two media and a range of texts, industries, audiences and debates.
Each topic has 4 prompt questions and you must be prepared to answer an exam question that relates to 1 or more of these prompts.
Reference should be made to the past, present and future in relation to the topic, with emphasis on the contemporary.

We are covering two topics:

1 Contemporary Media Regulation.
2 Media and Collective Identity.

And the two media we are covering are Film and TV.

The key prompt questions for Contemporary Media Regulation are:
1 What is the nature of contemporary media regulation compared with previous practices?
2 What are the arguments for and against specific forms of contemporary media regulation?
3 How effective are regulatory practices?
4 What are the wider social issues relating to media regulation?

The key prompt questions for Media and Collective Identity are:
1 How does the contemporary media represent nations, regions, and ethnic/social/collective groups of people in different ways?
2 How does contemporary representation compare to different time periods?
3 What are the social implications of different representations of groups of people?
4 To what extent is human identity increasingly mediated?

Quadrophenia 1979