Starting this week on Channel 4, This Is England ’86 is a four-part follow up to the BAFTA winning film This Is England.
Co-wrttien with Jack Thorne by original film scriptwriter and director Shane Meadows, This Is England ’86 reunites the film’s cast and picks up the story in 1986 where Shaun (Thomas Turgoose) is leaving school and on his own again.
A chance encounter reunites him with Woody (Joe Gilgun), Lol (Vicky McClure), & Smell (Rosamund Hanson) and the past is soon forgotten as the gang reform and start looking for love, a laugh, a job and something that resembles a future.
Shane Meadows says: “When I finished This Is England I had a wealth of material and unused ideas that I felt very keen to take further – audiences seemed to really respond to the characters we created and out of my long standing relationship with Film4 and Channel 4 the idea for a television serial developed.”
“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.”
Camilla Campbell, Head of Drama at Channel 4, said she was “thrilled” Meadows had agreed to continue the story on the small screen, adding: “I can’t wait to see the characters reunited in 1986 and watch their stories unfold over four hours of television. With all it has to say about the way we live now as well as the way we lived then, this is a darkly funny and utterly compelling British drama.”
This Is England ’86. Tue 7 Sept, 10pm, Channel 4 – www.channel4.com/thisisengland86
