From The Times, April 26, 2007
This is England, James Christopher
The news clips that open Shane Meadows’s skinhead film This is England are a perfect mix of
tabloid nostalgia and absurd TV. What a weird and unpleasant land Britain was in the early 1980s.
Shots of unemployed miners, National Front marches, Roland Rat and the royal wedding are cut to
perfection over a vintage ska track by Toots and the Maytals. Headlines about the storming of the
Iranian Embassy, Green-ham Common and the Falklands conflict are jumbled up with nerds playing
Space Invaders and grappling with Rubik cubes.
This is the England that 12-year-old Shaun (wonderfully played by Thomas Turgoose) inherits in 1983.
He is a surly misfit on a northern council estate. His father has returned from the Falklands in a body
bag. His grieving mother has neither the confidence nor cash to fill the awful void. Shaun is bullied at
school for his secondhand clothes. The boy aches for some control. He aches for people to talk to.
This neediness results in deep trouble when he is adopted by a gang of local skinheads whose
loyalties are subsequently poisoned by a racist nutter. What makes the film such compelling drama is
how familiar the landscape is almost 25 years on. Britain is stuck in another (bigger) war. Gun
violence is increasing. Nerds have discovered the iPod and the Nintendo DS. The Iranians are back in
the bad books.
I don’t think that Meadows set out to shoot a state-of-the-nation parable. He set out to explore a
contradiction within skinhead culture: the tribal dislike of foreigners, and the diehard allegiance to
Jamaican ska music.
Yet it’s clear that This is England is much bigger than this irony. The script is torn directly from
Meadows’s own experience of growing up on a council estate in Uttoxeter. Like Shaun, his social life
was transformed by shaving his hair off. In the film, the genial leader of the local gang, Woody (Joe
Gilgun), is amused by the boy’s gloomy wit and moved by his anguish. Shaun is adopted by this
motley crew and is empowered by his new uniform and older friends. Even his mother is impressed.
The gang are civil if not exactly angelic. They smash up empty council houses for fun, and get stoned
while listening to records. But they are not inclined to violence.
This bliss comes to an abrupt end when a virulently racist gang member called Combo (Stephen
Graham) arrives fresh from prison like Ray Winstone in Scum. He is demented. He sees a younger
and purer version of himself in Shaun and the ease with which the boy is beguiled by Combo’s anger
and politics is a social worker’s nightmare. The violence is only a matter of time. It’s a hair-raising
performance by Graham.
Few directors tap their damaged past as brilliantly as Meadows. This is England is by far his most
personal and powerful testimony.
This Is England - the Sunday Times review
Do you want to be in my gang? An unconvincing white working-class take on
the 1980s Cosmo Landesman April 29, 2007 From The Sunday Times
The opening credits to Shane Meadows’s This Is England feature the sound of the Clash and the sights that sum up the
1980s: Roland Rat, Mrs Thatcher, Duran Duran, the Rubik’s cube, the royal wedding. But Meadows’s film has no interest in
cosy nostalgia. His montage of the sunny side of popular culture quickly gives way to dark images of violence and social
conflict: the miners’ strike, National Front marches, football hooligans, Greenham women tearing down fences. The credits
end showing a Falklands soldier being taken off the field of battle, with half a leg missing.
Here is something unusual: a film set in the 1980s, but with not one greedy yuppie or poverty-stricken OAP in sight. And
instead of the usual setting of inner-city decay or London’s Docklands, Meadows has set his story in an unnamed coastal
town somewhere in the north of England. This is where 12-year-old Shaun (Thomas Turgoose) lives with his mum. He has
the small body of a child and the face of a grown-up; imagine a mixture of the Clitheroe Kid and the boy from Ken Loach’s
film Kes. This Is England – at least the first part – is Loach in the age of the Clash, Dr Martens, teen tribes, sex, drugs and
skinheads.
We meet Shaun as he’s heading off to school and suffering the torments of constant teasing, mostly about his flared trousers.
When a boy in the playground makes a crack about Shaun’s dad, who died in the Falklands, Shaun takes a stand and attacks.
It’s on his way back from a rotten school day that he comes across a gang of skinheads hanging out in an underpass. Their
leader is the amiable, kind-heartedWoody (Joseph Gilgun), who sees sad Shaun and invites him to join them. Woody and his
gang – which includes his girlfriend, Lol (Vicky McClure), a black skin called Milky (Andrew Shim) and a Boy Georgeish
girl called Smell (Rosamund Hanson) – soon become a substitute family for Shaun. He undergoes initiation into gang life by
having his head shaved, putting on boots and braces, and becoming one of them.
Meadows has managed to make a warm-hearted coming-of-age saga set among skinheads. Sounds sentimental? Not really,
for there was a time when skins welcomed black people, as well as their music. But the whole tone and balance of the film
changes with the arrival of Combo (Stephen Graham), who has just got out of prison. Suddenly, we’re in the territory
explored by Tim Roth in Alan Clarke’s Made in Britain. And Graham gives a performance of comparable power to Roth’s.
What follows is a battle between nice Woody and nasty Combo for the hearts, minds and fists of the gang. Combo is a racist
who wants to recruit them all to the National Front. Where Trevor had a gang, Combo has “my army”. Combo wins Shaun
over when he convinces him that this is the way to redeem his father’s death.
Here, the film loses its intimacy and subtle observations about the emotional dynamics of the group. Gone is Meadows’s
unobtrusive look at the complexity of loyalty; instead, the film becomes a search for the reason young working-class males
are seduced by the racist right. But Meadows reveals nothing fresh; his is the familiar line about how the white working class
has lost its sense of self-worth and collective identity. This theme appears early on when Gadget (Andrew Ellis) explains to
Woody why he slaps Shaun around the head: “I feel I’ve gone down in rank since he’s come.” It is this sense of
displacement, of being pushed out of your gang/country by foreigners, or even little kids, that the far right exploits. Worse
still is the way the film makes a clumsy and fatuous attempt to link the war in the Falklands with the kind of war Combo and
his skinhead army want to wage back at home. It is saying: encourage young men to be men through violence and the
demands of the tribe, and see what happens.
This Is England has been praised for its accurate portrait of teen life and the skinhead subculture. But I beg to differ. Would
a northern skinhead in 1983 really have used a term associated with 1990s rave culture, “chill”? Would a girl skin have said
“No worries”, as one does here? Were skinheads such as Combo really against the Falklands war? In an age when radical
Muslims are recruiting young Asians as suicide bombers, this account of how the white working class was exploited by the
far right seems a little out of sync with our times and concerns.