MARCHING TO THE BEAT OF A DIFFERENT BRUM…
PEAKY BLINDERS CREATOR STEVEN KNIGHT AND STARS LEVI BROWN AND MICHELLE DOCKERY TELL ABI JACKSON ABOUT EXPLOSIVE NEW BBC DRAMA THIS TOWN
Tomorrow, BBC1, 9pm
WHEN it came to making This Town, the new original six-part drama from Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, it was vital for all the key elements to feel authentic.
Featuring Downton Abbey actress Michelle Dockery, Django actor Nicholas Pinnock and rising stars Levi Brown and Ben Rose, among others, it’s set in 1981 Birmingham against a backdrop of simmering social tension, political unrest and threats of violence, with tricky family dynamics tying it all together.
The series follows a group of young people trying to discover their path in life. They find it by forming a band and are drawn into the world of ska and two-tone music.
Michelle plays alcoholic Estella Quinn, who has been expelled from Birmingham on the orders of the IRA and her gunman husband.
With her hopes of being a professional singer apparently in tatters, she turns to vodka.
The role enabled Michelle, 42, who is in a band with Downton costar Michael Fox (footman Andy Parker) to show off her singing voice. Viewers are in for a treat when wayward Estella bursts into song in a Catholic church.
“When I read the script, that was the scene that did it. I thought, ‘I’m playing this role’,” says Michelle.
She adds of the characters in This Town: “They’re struggling in some way in life, and the music roots them all.”
While some filming took place at Steven’s new Digbeth Loc. Film and TV Studios, a lot of the series was shot on location in and around Birmingham. Steven and series director Paul Whittington were eager to capture the spirit and energy of these places at that point in history, including at two council estates that play an important part in the story.
“Paul’s done such a brilliant job,” says Steven. “It’s brilliant, it’s glamorous, it’s dramatic,” he adds of how the director brought the council estate settings to life.
“The idea is that the [housing] blocks and the council estates look beautiful,” he adds, acknowledging estates can sometimes be portrayed in a negative light.
Thankfully for Paul, getting in with the locals wasn’t difficult.
“They were actually very welcoming to us. I mean, if you say you’re working with the guy who made Peaky Blinders, a lot of doors open,” he says, smiling. “So that was a definite advantage. The Brummies are rightly very proud of that show.”
Of course, Peaky Blinders – the hugely popular period gangster crime drama starring recent Oscar winner Cillian Murphy, which ran from 2013 to 2022 – was also set in Birmingham.
In many ways, This Town is a love letter to Birmingham and nearby Coventry, and the series has personal roots for the screenwriter, producer and director who grew up in an area called Streetly on the city’s borders.
“This was the era I grew up around, I experienced similar places,” says Steven, who recalls the powerful influence the music scene had at the time.
“When you look back, there was a period in Coventry and Birmingham when a certain sort of music
appeared, that people who
were completely opposite in terms of race ... suddenly everybody came together.
“So you go to a Birmingham football match, and after the match, you go to the pubs and you turn up the record player and plug in this music, and everybody was just united. It wasn’t deliberate or forced... It just happened.
“I thought it would be interesting to tell a story set then.”
Music is often about finding hope and identity and escape, Steven agrees. But he wanted this to be almost something that happens organically in the plot.
“It [music] appeals to a certain part of the psyche that isn’t rational or reasonable. That’s what I’m trying to do, the idea that they [the characters] are not seeking it out, they’re not trying to find it – this thing is finding them. It’s giving them something that’s different.”
But there are themes in This Town that audiences can relate to wherever they’re from in the world.
Paul says: “I think it’s really interesting, because it’s a very personal piece for Steve, but it feels very personal to me [too]. And actually, the more personal you make something in the writing of it, the more universal it becomes.
“All the themes of being at that age, of being a teenager and that search for identity – who am I, who’s my tribe? – and expressing that through the music you listen to and the clothes that you wear, that’s something we could all relate to.”
At the heart of these characters is Dante – played by Levi Brown – a teenage poet and “good kid” at odds with the social tensions and chaos unfolding around him, who finds himself drawn to the rush and promise of life in a band.
It’s a breakthrough role for Levi, who also hails from the West Midlands and graduated from the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in 2021. So, what was his first impression after getting the script?
“I think the first thing that came up was fear,” he admits, laughing. “How on earth am I going to do this?”
It was an interesting character to play, he adds: “It’s the fact he can go from being in front of a gangster, the most dangerous gangster in Birmingham allegedly, and then just go and see the girl he fancies. And just completely switch from moment to moment.”
It’s Dante’s poetic streak that leads him into music – which is also, of course, front and centre in the series. A number of original songs were created especially by acclaimed producer Dan Carey and musician and poet Kae Tempest, along with a number of covers and tracks by big name artists.
And while it might now be four decades on from the 1980s, when it comes to the wider political context and social moods of the time, does Steven think there are parallels with what’s happening in the world right now? “Absolutely. It’s weird writing stuff – sometimes you write it before it’s topical, which is strange, it becomes topical.
“With this, I think the fracture and disruption of society, the pessimism, all of those bleak things that we’ve got at the moment, were there then,” Steven reflects.
“My intention with [This Town] was to take all of that bleakness, and then find out that it’s OK – that people will make it OK if you leave them alone. That’s what this is about.
“It’s about people who are in very, very difficult circumstances, not through any fault of their own. And we all know what things are like at the moment, it’s not great. “But hopefully people will watch this and think, well, at least you can have a laugh and a song.”
If you say you’re working with the guy who made Peaky Blinders, a lot of doors open Paul Whittington on filming in Birmingham
IN 2019, shortly after the death of convicted paedophile and financier Jeffrey Epstein, Prince Andrew was interviewed by Emily Maitlis for the BBC’s Newsnight programme.
The subsequent conversation turned into something quite remarkable, in which he denied allegations of impropriety via a series of bizarre revelations, including an inability to sweat and a trip to Woking’s Pizza Express.
The event has now been turned into one of the most eagerly awaited dramas of the year so far, which reveals how the interview was set up, thanks to high stakes negotiations between producer Sam McAlister and Buckingham Palace.
Gillian Anderson and Rufus Sewell play Maitlis and the prince respectively, with the former saying she initially had reservations about taking the part.
“It was just too scary to play Emily Maitlis, because she’s
still living, because she’s so formidable, because people know her so well,” says The X-Files and Sex Education star, who also played Margaret Thatcher in The Crown.
Billie Piper, Keeley Hawes and Romola Garai co-star.