Forehead Mowing: Part 3

I rate the guy who made up numbers. I think he's up there with the guy who made up sex. Without him having made them up we could never have built stuff or done the internet or anything. But the thing about numbers is there is always maths.

Bear with this because it’s brilliant.

Maths is like Gadget: sixteen, with a scum-tash and an Arran jumper being beckoned by a bosomy middle aged woman into bed. No joy in his sex. He's grown sideways. What a waste of time.

Maths is like Lol and Woody: two whole episodes in an hypnotically convincing cycle of misery, and mistrust and palpable, palpable, sexlessness.

Lol and Milk are well maths. It was all so exciting a week ago. Now Lol is beckoning Milk into a public toilet promising to let him do her from behind. Shane Meadows has got a maths brush out, painting everything good, bad.

There's so much sex around and so much misery that it’s impossible, at least for an evening hour, to separate them in your head. What comes out of it though, what has happened across the TV this nine o’clock, is a hideous burlesque.

Its an old trick but done well and innovatively. For ten minutes there is colour and excitement and football. Then suddenly its all misery and misery and (suddenly) horror.

It’s all so sudden!

And it’s suddenly so horrible at the end. Then you find out why Lol is so mathematical. Joking aside, the end of this episode was one of the most harrowing things I've ever seen on screen. The brutal and catastrophic rape scene which finishes the episode off, made me put my fingers over my eyes. It is a brave and hideous thing to do.

I think that that’s what I think about it.

Soz that isn't the end. The end was a big twist, smashing onto the carpet like 15 stone of scouse, neo-Nazi, mumbo jumbo. But that’s for next week. For now: well done to you Shane Meadows. I have a vein pumping in my head.

Forehead Mowing: Part 2

Dad’s are shit. But the only thing worse than Dads is men.

This is England was a photograph about some children whose parents were conspicuous in their absence. We never met Woody or Lol or Gadgets parents. The implication was that these kids (not much more than kids) were gossamer who had wandered into the lions den and then floated out again, careless and jobless and parentless.

In the second episode of This is England ’86, the characters of these absent parents are taken by the scruff of the neck and hauled into the dock. Lol’s mother re-unites with her abusive husband, Woody’s is a paragon of disinterested suburbanism, while Vomit’s dad has returned and appears to be giving free reign to his dangerous temper. Meanwhile we discover that Cynth is shagging Mr. Sandhu and even Meggy has abandoned his only son to the clutches of nymphomaniac registrar Trudy.

As the master of grit, Shane Meadows movies always run the risk of the soap opera tag. Transferred to TV series, the shadow creeps nearer. Of course there are hints of melodrama, but its in the relentlessness of its theme, the catastrophe of absent parents, that This is England ‘86 surmounts this. It bullies and bombards its point across.

One other thing that marks ’86 out from the soaps is the fact that you can seriously enjoy the company of these characters. There is a sequence in which the gang invade their neighbours house and have a party involving top hats, Special Brew and a Jacuzzi. It is one of the most joyful pieces of television I have ever seen.

An unlikely love story is emerging. I don’t want to give the game away but it is one that has broken my little heart a bit. It provides the show with a closing image of unbelievable beauty. It is so happy, but so sad.

OK, I’m sorry about last week. I know I’ve left it til now. I think its fair to say that the first episode was a bit ploddier, a bit too much exposition. This week though. Oh my! I love them so, I don’t want them to get hurt. I don’t want them to hurt each other. Get up Woody! Get up Milky! We love you!

Forehead Mowing: Part 1

You know that bit in Hook were one of the little kids puts his hand on Robin Williams face and says, like, 'Peter! You're old!' Well it was something like that when we watched This is England '86 the other night. Me and a few other boys.

Woody, Shaun, Smell, Banjo, Meggy, Gadget and the rest are back after a few years, and they are a few years older for it.

It frankly made me sad myself, an inside sadness to see Shaun all grown up. Even though it’s a biological impossibility that I could be his father, I felt like I was. I felt like I was his father, readying myself to say 'I know we haven't spoken for some time.'

Maybe that’s a strength, but it’s difficult to watch. Woody, your second fave, grew up too. He changed out of being a 4-Skin and changed into being Noel Gallagher. Even Banjo softened up. He still looks like a Nazi, but in the movie, you'll remember, he looked like the whole Khmer Rouge. He gets kissed on the head in the movie, while he's carrying a machete.

Along with the characters, the performances seem to have lost their edge a tad also. All of the actors, Andrew Ellis’s Gadget in particular, seem to have lost a little bit of that careless, shrugged, accidencyof delivery that gave the movie so much of its charm. They all seem a bit more tutored, a bit more actorly.

And it’s all a bit glossy, a bit more grown up. The colours and camerawork feel more classy, more Channel Four Dramary. It felt like This is England had put on weight. This is England learned to play sax.

And it all just feels a bit softer, a bit duller.

But it’s important to say that this might all change on Tueaday. Rumour has it that Combo comes back on Tuesday. His appearance in the movie was, remember, the thing that started all the bother.

And it’s also important to say that, by most standards, this is well good TV.

Also, some of the new things are the best things about it. Perry Fitzpatrick as the bully, Flip, for instance, has all the hysterical, whinnying, malevolence of Morrell, Paddy Considine's terrifying villain from Romeo Brass. His sequence, a calamitous Wodehousean rigmarole with an ill-fated plan to “win fair-lady”, is the best thing in it actually.

Maybe I sound like one of those twats who backed Rufio. I swear I’m not. I still love This is England. I'm just a bit suspicious that he might be turning into Robin Williams. We'll see.