THE VIRTUES

Director Shane Meadows leaves This Is England behind for his new TV drama.

It’s been nearly four years since Shane Meadows’ last TV project, the Bafta-winning final part of the This Is England saga, and way longer since the writer/director created something entirely new that wasn’t part of that world. Not that he’s suddenly gone rogue and come up with a sci-fi epic. Instead, he pitches The Virtues, which stars long-time collaborator, actor Stephen Graham, as tonally somewhere between his two greatest achievements: “The Virtues takes the biblical, almost apocalyptic levels of revenge witnessed in [2004 film] Dead Man’s Shoes, along with the bittersweet humour from This is England and creates a landscape like nothing else I’ve ever worked on.”

The series, shot entirely on location in Sheffield, Liverpool and Belfast, is partly a love story between two damaged people. Graham’s character Joseph is on a journey to Ireland to deal with the reverberations of a traumatic childhood spent in the care system there. Along the way he meets Dinah, played by newcomer Niamh Algar, who has her own closely guarded secret.

As with his three stunning This Is England series for Channel 4, Meadows has written the scripts for The Virtues with the massively in-demand Jack Thorne (National Treasure, Kiri), while Meadows himself is directing all four episodes.

We still live in hope of another visit to This Is England one day (rumours of a final episode continue to persist), but it doesn’t get much more exciting than Brand New Meadows.