From skinheads to sausage sandwiches
As the latest instalment of Shane Meadows’ This is England saga comes to an end, James Croot finds the upfront British writer-director torn about whether to return to his beloved characters one more time.
There was a time when Shane Meadows would do anything for love. While studying photography at Burton College in the early 1990s, he met a beautiful girl he really fancied and attempted what was, for him, the seemingly unthinkable.
‘‘She was a fine arts student and she used to wear headbands, so I started wearing a beret, trying to be dead trendy, but it actually made me look like a big, massive knob,’’ the affable 44-year-old British writer-director confesses down the phoneline from the United Kingdom. ‘‘Then she told me she’d never kiss anyone or go out with anyone that wasn’t vegan or vege, because she couldn’t stand the thought they they’d had meat in their mouth. I lied and said that I was vegetarian as well.’’
However, to both keep up appearances and satisfy his cravings, Meadows enlisted the help of his good mate Paddy Considine, then just beginning his acting career, to sneak him sausage sandwiches out the back of the college. ‘‘It was all going well, until she caught me one day,’’ recalls Meadows. ‘‘I was so lazy I’d never brought any of the plates in. She saw all of them and realised she’d been kissing me over all those weeks I’d been eating all these dirty pork bangers.’’
That incident is one of the few stories from his youth Meadows has yet to mine for his semiautobiographical series This is
England, which over the course of the past decade has spawned a feature film and three mini-series, charting the exploits of Meadows cipher Shaun Fields (Thomas Turgoose), from callow 12-yearold youth who falls in with a bunch of skinheads, to budding college photography student.
He admits Shaun’s journey from 1983 to 1990 has stayed incredibly true to his own. ‘‘As we showed in This is England ‘88 ,I was in a Victorian Melodrama one Christmas. Those lines that he reads and that rubbish costume that he wears – they were mine. And I ended up leaving that performing arts course in the same way he did.’’
Part of the series’ success has been down to its unique tone, mixing pathos with comedy – often in the same scene. That’s something that Meadows, who was once arrested for stealing a breast pump, says is reflective of his own upbringing. ‘‘It always seemed to be belly-laughs one second and worst nightmare the next. You could be having the best days of your life and, if you ran into the wrong person at the wrong time, it could become the worst, in a heartbeat.’’
One of the most illustrative and vivid examples of this, he recalls, was the time he came from a great summer holiday’s swim to discover a media scrum around his home, as his lorry-driving dad was arrested on suspicion of murdering a child.
‘‘My Dad had found a girl’s body, but eventually they let him go because his lorry’s tachograph showed he was in a completely different part of the country when she was killed. However, it left this dirty stigma with our family and they didn’t find the bloke that killed her for years. I’ve got all these memories of thinking ‘hey I’ve just jumped off this big board – f… my Dad’s just been arrested for murder’. And, in a way, This is
England echoes that split mentality.’’
But, despite the current series earning three awards at the recent Baftas, Meadows is unsure whether he’ll return to the world of Shaun, Milky, Combo and Lol. For one thing, its success has meant it’s become harder to get the ensemble cast together.
‘‘When she shot the original film, one of our leading men was a plasterer and we found Tommo [Turgoose] in an amusement arcade after he had been expelled from school. They had a bit of time on their hands back in the day. But now we’ve got cast members in America half the year. It’s lovely to see that happen, but it makes aligning everyone’s schedule rather difficult.’’
Meadows himself also has a desire to tell other stories in other formats. He’s got three long-term projects (‘‘a smorgasbord of ideas’’) in the pipeline – a bigger TV series on bare-knuckle boxing champion Bartley Gorman, the self-styled ‘‘King of the Gypsies’’, a film about Nottingham-born 1960s Tour De France cyclist Tommy Simpson and Beware the
Devil, a tale set in that same era about a man who started fiddling with the occult, got possessed and then became an exorcist himself.
Then there’s a wariness about going back to the dramatic well too many times. ‘‘It has been such a lovely job and the trick is knowing when to stop and making sure we don’t go that one step too far and ruin that good work. So many series have started off on a high and then it runs for too long and it ends up being all tainted. No story on earth can survive 80 or 90 episodes and I think in America sometimes people get rich and get lazy. Everything done on This is
England has been a labour of love. And, I have to admit it would be kind of beautiful if we didn’t do anything else, because it kind of began in 1983 with this kid who attaches himself to a culture and currently ends in the 1990s where he became part of his own. So, if I never went back, there is this lovely symmetry.
‘‘Also, what would I do with [Margaret] Thatcher? She’s been in every title sequence so far. If I made another one, I don’t quite know how I would get her in there.’’
When I suggest maybe he could fast-forward to her death, Meadows voice lightens and his stance softens. ‘‘You could, yeah. I have got one story left which is probably rather a film than a series and I do quite like the idea of bookending the whole thing with a feature film. It’s something that isn’t necessarily bound by having to be set in a particular year – it could be 1994, or the millennium. But it would definitely be the final encounter – if we ever make it.’’
One thing is for certain though, if Meadows does decide to have another crack at it, his vegan disaster will make the cut.
‘‘Oh yeah, if I get Shaun to university, Tommo’s definitely going to have the sausage story unfold on his ass.’’
‘It always seemed to be belly-laughs one second and worst nightmare the next.’ Shane Meadows