Get your skates on, Steven... this ode to 80s ska is so slow
This Town
Sunday & Monday, BBC1 ★★★★★
The Assembly
Friday, BBC1 ★★★★★
This Town is Steven Knight’s first drama series since Peaky Blinders, and from the pre-publicity material – ‘young people are drawn into the world of ska and two-tone music in the West Midlands in the 1980s and form a band’ – I had anticipated something along the lines of The Commitments. Remember that? Alan Parker’s joyous film about those working-class Dublin kids who become a soul band? I thought it would be that but with slim-Jim ties and pork-pie hats.
That’s what I was expecting, and hoping for, which is why I kept yelling ‘Get on with it!’ at the telly and also: ‘Put your skates on!’ There are six hour-long episodes (all available on BBC iPlayer), and although there is a ton of music on the soundtrack, the band doesn’t actually get together until five hours and 35 minutes in, and even then they’re not terribly good. What does Steven Knight imagine? That I’m going to live for ever? And have time for this?
This is set in Birmingham and Coventry amid the council estates and concrete subways where Knight grew up, and where our main character is Dante (Levi Brown). Dante is 18 and duffel-coated and a poet but keeps quiet about that. Only joking. You can’t shut him up, and he is even likely to introduce himself with: ‘I write poems. Sometimes about space.’ Others indulge him as a ‘genius’, even though I saw no evidence of that myself and found him deeply annoying.
He is never curious about anyone, which is odd for a poet. For inspiration he likes to stand on the bridge over the M6, a road which, he says, ‘seems to come from nowhere and go nowhere’. (I wanted to grab him by the lapels, look him in the eye and say: ‘Dante, if you were ever curious, you’d find out that the M6 runs between Gretna and Rugby.’) He has an older brother, Gremoments gory (Jordan Bolger), who, at the outset is a British soldier stationed in Belfast. Gregory is Tommy Shelby. Gregory is tough, cool-headed, cunning, always one step ahead of his enemies. There is also a cousin, Bardon (Ben Rose), who has a terrific singing voice but is being forced by his Irish father to join the IRA. ‘I have a lot on my mind,’ Bardon tells Dante at one point. Dante does not say: ‘What’s going on, cousin?’ Dante is too busy staring at the road he thinks goes nowhere rather than caring much about anyone else. This Town is masculine, with bursts of violence, and skinheads on the prowl, and the IRA blowing stuff up, and racist police, but there are no psychopathic gangsters like Peaky Blinders. Only kidding again.
There are quite a few of those. On the female front, meanwhile, we have Dante’s friend Jeannie (Eve Austin), who writes the music for his words, and Fiona (Freya Parks), with whom Dante is in love, and who works in the record shop. They only exist to save Dante from himself.
There’s a scene in the final episode when Jeannie and Fiona are in a car and play a game at the traffic lights where they have to tell each other facts about themselves. I’m guessing Knight had realised they are criminally underwritten. That scene was so obvious – Oops, forgot to write the ladies! – that I laughed. But, that said, Michelle Dockery is surprisingly wonderful as Dante’s broken, alcoholic mother. Aside from all else, she can really sing.
The narrative arcs are all familiar. Dante says at the outset that he doesn’t smoke, drink or do drugs so we know he’ll be doing all three at some point. His father is a recovering alcoholic who has been sober for years, so immediately you’re in the brace position, expecting his relapse. The final do give you what you wanted all along, as we always knew they would, but six hours to get there? When I’m not going to live for ever?
OK, if you want something joyous, I’ll give you something joyous, and that is The
Assembly, which is pure joy. I can’t recall the last time there was so much joy on television. Or any kind of show that involves lovely people all being lovely to each other, and that’s about it.
It’s based on a French format where a celebrity is interviewed by people who are autistic, neurodivergent or learning disabled. They can be (terrifyingly) unfiltered in their questioning. President Macron appeared on the French version, where he was told: ‘You should be exemplary and not marry your teacher.’ Good point, well made.
This British version has the actor Michael Sheen in the hot seat. He is delighted to be there. You can just tell. Questions can be rather leftfield – ‘Do you like rock climbing? Skiing?’ – but also on the nose. Julice asks: ‘How does it feel to be dating someone who is only five years older than your daughter?’ Nice one, Julice.
He’s also asked about the rudest celebrity he’s ever encountered and actually answers: ‘Jennifer Lawrence is… cheeky.’ He is asked if he’s scared of bats, why he gave back his OBE, what he most likes to eat (egg and chips) and what it was like kissing David Tennant in Good Omens. ‘We didn’t talk about it, just went for it, and now we never talk about it.’
There are tears in his eyes when someone beautifully recites a Dylan Thomas poem, and also at the end, when a trio sing Here Comes The Sun with more passion and feeling then anything we heard in This Town. He says afterwards that he has loved it because ‘usually interviews are so boring as you get the same questions over and over again’. Fair point, but tell me: what do you prefer doing? Film or television?