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BURTON film director Shane Meadows is to make his next movie about the rise of the skinhead movement in Thatcher’s Britain.
Staffordshire Newspapers - Burton Mail

recommend this article to a friend Oi! This Is England will lay bare the violence and racism Meadows witnessed as he grew up in Uttoxeter in the 1980s.

The 32-year-old will base the film on his own experiences as a young skinhead.

Details of the project were announced yesterday at the Cannes Film Festival.

Set in his home town, the film will tell the story of an 11-year-old boy who shaves his head and falls in with an older neo-Nazi gang after his father dies.

Meadows said his early association with skinhead gangs had an enormous effect on him.

"The pulsating music and the skin-tight fashion, the ‘f*** the state’ attitude and the primal violence left an enormous emotional imprint on me," he said. "I believe this period of my life is the reason I became a film-maker."

Meadows is hoping the new film will be as successful as his last feature, the acclaimed Dead Man's Shoes , which he co-wrote with long-time collaborator and the film's star, Winshill actor Paddy Considine. Although given a limited theatrical release, the violent revenge thriller was a critics' favourite and has done brisk business since its release on DVD earlier this year. In the documentary In Shane's Shoes, which chronicled the making of his last picture, Meadows told of the shocking act of violence in his Uttoxeter youth which prompted him to become disillusioned with his new skinhead friends.

He said: "I convinced this guy that I was desperate to see a fight, so he took me somewhere and beat this lad up. It was horrible.

"I thought it was going to be like you would see in the films — throw him about a bit, hit him in the tummy, hit him in the face, hooray, hooray, it’s over.

“But seeing someone stamping on someone’s face and feeling responsible for that . . . suddenly I was handed a big bag of emotions that I should never have had at that age."

Meadows described Oi! This Is England as "my most directly political film to date".

It will highlight the irony that the skinhead sub-culture was originally born out of a love of black reggae music, before the movement was hijacked by the racist National Front.

Meadows and his production team are in talks with reggae label Trojan to supply the soundtrack.

Part-financed by Film Four, the project has a budget of just £2.2 million.

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Italian film honour for Meadows

Director Shane Meadows has picked up the special jury prize at the inaugural Rome Film Festival for This Is England.

The film, set in 1983, is about an impressionable young boy who becomes involved with a gang of skinheads.

Meadows drew on his own experience as a troubled teenager student who dropped out of school to tell the story of Shaun, an isolated boy growing up in a grim English coastal town.

He says he found the lead character for the film, 13-year- old Thomas "Tommo" Turgoose, at a project for disadvantaged children in the town of Grimsby.

"He had grown up with all the odds stacked up heavily against him," Meadows recalls in the film's production notes.

As he thanked the jury for the prize on Saturday, Meadows said: "Twelve months ago, the young actor in this film was going through a dramatic period in his life and had no chances. A year later, he is getting a prize ... that could change his life."

"I thank the jury because the subject matter of the film is not something easy to vote for," Meadows told the AFP news agency.

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Oi! Who are you calling a luvvie?
Richard Owen
Skinheads are the gritty stars of Shane Meadow's latest film, This is England, which will be shown at the London Film Festival on Tuesday
“The trouble with cinema in our country, unlike some of the rest of Europe, is that most people want to eat popcorn and be entertained,” says Shane Meadows, the self-taught film director from Uttoxeter who took the Rome Film Festival by storm last week with This is England, a stunning evocation of 1980s Britain.

“They don’t want to be challenged by a film about working-class racism. They don’t want to be dragged through the bushes.” His face breaks into an amiable grin. “But people can see what they like. It’s their money.”

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This is England, to be shown at The Times BFI London Film Festival on Tuesday, was given a standing ovation and a special award at its European premiere in Rome. The film tells the story of 12-year-old Shaun (Thomas Turgoose) in a bleak coastal town, who turns to local skinhead leaders as substitutes for his father, killed in the Falklands War.

Devastated by the loss, and picked on by schoolmates, he at first falls in with a gang led by the intelligent and sensitive Woody (Joe Gilgun), experiencing the first stirrings of teenage love with a punk girl nicknamed Smell (“rhymes with Michelle,” as she artlessly explains after their first kiss).

The gang let him join in their “hunting games” (which include vandalising empty houses in bizarre costumes, a scene at once hilarious and disturbing), shave his head and dress him up in skinhead gear. His hard-pressed mother Cynthia (Jo Hartley) is at first appalled, but senses that the gang is relatively benign.

“All of us know that moment when your friends become your world and your mum and dad are an embarrassment,” Meadows observes. Things turn ugly, however, when Combo, a rival skinhead leader — a mesmerising performance by Stephen Graham — returns from a prison spell and takes over the gang, enrolling “his” skinheads in a nascent National Front branch and leading them in attacks on Asian immigrants.

Only when the charismatic but unstable Combo beats to a pulp Milky, the one West Indian member of the gang (Andrew Shim), does Shaun see the light, casting his cherished St George’s flag into the sea. It is a remarkable performance by Turgoose — “Tommo” to the cast — an unknown (now 14) spotted in a Grimsby games arcade. “He was the only one who asked for a fiver and we said, ‘that’s our boy’,” Meadows says.

Critics in Rome applauded its “brutal honesty”, which is about right: this is surely one of the most powerful films about racist violence, and for that matter about the raw emotions and realities of life on a rundown council estate, yet made by a British director. It is completely believable, and at times very funny, as well as extremely grim.

On the face of it the film — shot in Nottingham and Grimsby on a budget of £2.2 million, with a score by the Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi — is about the 1980s, and specifically 1983. Thatcher’s Britain appears almost as remote as Victoria’s: this is the England of the Falklands War, the miners’ strike, Rubik’s cube and Roland Rat. And, of course, skinheads.

Meadows, now 33, was himself a skinhead and school dropout — he still somewhat resembles the kind of shaven-headed “big tough guy” he admits admiring when he was growing up. The character is based on Meadows himself, who vividly recalls the way in which gangs filled a vacuum for youngsters with little hope.

“In the town where I was brought up you were guaranteed status through physicality, through violence. In a lot of communities in England growing up is about how tough you are. When I was a kid, seeing a group of skinheads for the first time was like seeing the Army marching down my street. For the first time in my life I felt protected.”

The film distinguishes between the original reggae-loving skinhead gangs and the politically extreme groups that followed them — a “ready-made army, easy prey”. The first-generation skinheads, Meadows says, were white and black kids who sought work in factories and shipyards and were united in a love of Jamaican music.

“The message was not so much anti-immigrant as anti-Thatcher. It was incredibly arrogant, of course. We were basically saying, ‘Maggie Thatcher, you run the country how you like, but we’re going to run our town the way we like’. It wasn’t true, but it felt true at the time.”

The uniform was a Ben Sherman shirt, braces and Doc Marten boots. Only later, with the “second generation”, came the ugly turn to National Front politics, the appropriation of the St George’s flag and violence against “Pakis”. “We were told that black, Asian and Chinese people were evil and stealing jobs. There was a time in my young life when I thought those things were true.”

But although on one level the film is about 1983, it is also about the present. The title, after all, is This is England, not This Was England. “Oh, completely, yes,” Meadows says. “The film is set in a particular time and place, and is partly about my own experiences. But yeah, it is also about what is happening in our country today.

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“What I think I’ve done is to examine things that are still completely valid, looking at the past in a way which shows it’s also about now. I wasn’t trying to be clever, but there was something about that time which allowed me to tell the story without pulling punches.”

The background then was the Falklands War, whereas “now it is Iraq”. For the National Front, read the BNP. “It’s a period film, but the same problems and issues exist today. The character of Shaun is me, but it also draws on Tommo’s experiences.”

Some things have changed, Meadows believes. “We had trouble finding an estate without satellite dishes and double glazing. Unemployment isn’t as bad, and political correctness has kicked in. Take television: 20 years ago white working-class people used words like darkie or spade, and so did Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part, but you couldn’t swear on TV. Now you can swear all you like, but you can’t say wog or coon.”

In the 1980s, he says, immigrants, especially the Asians, were much more passive. “Nowadays the black or Asian guys I know in Nottingham would knock you down if you called them darkies. But the underbelly of racism is still there, often directed at Poles and Romanians nowadays. The issue is much the same as it was.”

The underlying theme is perhaps not so much racism as masculinity, teenage males searching for role models in the absence of father figures. In this the film develops from Meadows’s previous work, A Room for Romeo Brass, Once Upon a Time in the Midlands and Dead Man’s Shoes.

In a sense, Meadows says, it is a prequel, an attempt to show the roots from which his work sprang. “The best films with a universal message, like Martin Scorsese’s, don’t set out to make broad statements, they depict a microcosm.” The beating of Milky, which “reflects a night of horrific violence I witnessed as a boy”, stands for “all the people who are beaten or killed every day but who you never read about”.

Films about race or working-class life “sometimes choose a controversial political backdrop in the hope they will appear more serious than they are”, Meadows says. “That annoys me a bit.”

In This is England the politics “seeps in through radio and TV in the background. We filmed it in rundown flats and pubs. I think I’ve been true to that time rather than just using it as a prop.”

His next project is a film for Channel 4 about the Yorkshire Ripper. But he also has plans for a modern version of the Bible story of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, set not in the Midlands, but in Eastern Europe. “Perhaps it’s time I branched out a bit,” he adds.

This is England shows at The Times BFI 50th London Film Festival on October 31 and November 1 (020-7928 3232)

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Under my skin

Forget shoulder pads and Rick Astley - growing up in the 1980s was a riot of great music, fashion and subcultures, as new film This Is England shows. Here, director Shane Meadows recalls a youth of ska music, scrapping and a time when people 'still cared' about politics

Saturday April 21, 2007
The Guardian

It's easy to laugh at the 1980s. Many people base their memories on the stuff they see in those I Love The 80s TV shows: massive VHS recorders, Atari consoles and rubbish digital watches, all shown against a backing of Now That's What I Call Music Vol 2. Then there was the way that people dressed: your mum with a deranged perm, your dad in a pair of grey leather slip-ons and your sister with a "Frankie Says Relax" T-shirt and a stack of love bites round her neck.

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But my memories have more meaning than that. As a kid growing up in Uttoxeter, Staffs, it was a time of great music, brilliant fashion and a vibrant youth culture that makes today's kids look dull and unimaginative by comparison. It was also a time of massive unrest when British people were still prepared to fight for the stuff they believed in. My new film, This Is England, is about all of these things.

Set in 1983, this is the first period film I have made. A great deal of it is based on my own childhood and I tried to recreate my memoirs of being an 11-year-old kid trying to fit in. It was a time when Uttoxeter, like the rest of the country, was awash with endless different youth tribes. There were new romantics, heavy rockers, smoothies, punks, goths, skins and mod revivalists who were into the Specials and 2 Tone. Then there were those pop culture kids who came into school wearing one green sock, one pink sock and some deely boppers on their head. People often looked daft, but were genuinely committed to their chosen denomination and would wear their identities on their sleeves with immense pride. In a town as small as Uttoxeter, though, there weren't enough people for each sub culture to fill their own parties or clubs, so most weekends everyone would turn up at the same village hall disco and end up fighting.

Like most 11-year-old kids who wore jumpers with animals on, I got bullied by the older kids at school. So I looked for my own tribe to join. It was the skinhead movement that enamoured me the most. I remember seeing 10 or 15 of them at the bus shelter on my way home from school one summer night and thinking they were the most fearsome thing I had ever seen. Even though I was terrified of them, I was instantly attracted to them. To be a part of most of the other factions you had to be a little rich kid. But to be a skinhead, all you needed was a pair of jeans, some work boots, a white shirt and a shaved head. You could be transformed from a twerp into a fearsome warrior in 15 minutes. Skins appealed to me because they were like soldiers: they wore their outfits like suits of armour and demanded respect. There were playground myths that surrounded them and especially their Dr Martens boots. It was feared that a single kick from a DM boot would kill you or at the very least give you brain damage. I can remember kids refusing to fight unless the skinhead agreed to remove his fearsome boots first.

My older sister was going out with a skinhead who took me under his wing and taught me about the roots of the whole culture. He was a nice bloke who bore no relation to the stereotypical racist yob that people now associate with that time. It was him that I based the character of Woody on in the film. I learned from him that skinheads had grown out of working class English lads working side by side with west Indians in factories and shipyards in the late-60s. The black lads would take the whites to blues parties where they were exposed to ska music for the first time. Soon, Jamaican artists like Desmond Dekker, the Upsetters and Toots And The Maytals were making a living out of songs aimed directly at English white kids. This was where the whole skinhead thing came from - it was inherently multicultural. But nowadays when I tell people that I used to be a skinhead, they think I'm saying I used to be racist. My film shows how rightwing politics started to creep into skinhead culture in the 1980s and change people's perception of it. This was a time when there were three and a half million people unemployed and we were involved in a pointless war in the Falklands. When people are frustrated and disillusioned that's when you get extremist groups moving in and trying to exploit the situation. That's what the National Front did in the early-80s. Skinheads had always taken pride in being working class and English so they were easy targets for the NF who said that their identities were under threat. They cultivated a real hatred of the Asian community. In the film, Combo represents the sort of charismatic leader the NF used to turn skinheads into violent street enforcers. Suddenly, all skinheads were branded the same way. But most of the real old skins who were into the music and the clothes went on to be scooter boys to separate themselves from the racism. I always wanted This Is England to tell the truth about skinheads.

As I started to make the film, other themes started to interest me. We had a relatively small budget so we couldn't afford to recreate every last detail of the Uttoxeter of 1983. Instead, I set the scene by using archive news footage at the start and end of the film. Going though footage of the Falklands war really made me think again about the whole thing. As kids, we thought it was like going into a World Cup campaign. It was exciting and we were cheering on our lads to go and do the Argies. But the scenes of soldiers' coffins shocked and appalled me.

In many ways the country was a mess. The miners' strike was massive - they were killing scabs by throwing paving slabs from bridges onto cars. You had all the protesters and unrest at Greenham Common. But remembering all of these things made me nostalgic for a time when people were ready to stand up and say something. People cared about where the country was going. As the 1980s ended we had the poll tax riots which turned out to be the end of an era. Afterwards, it was like the nation lost its backbone. People were bought off. They were given a little bit of land, the right to buy their council house and put a little satellite dish on the front of it. They became content and lost their will to rock the boat.

The big difference between now and the period in which my film is set is our level of isolation. In 1983, people still cared about society as a whole but now they'll keep their mouth shut as long as they've got the house, the job and the car they want. If you were a kid in 1983, you wouldn't have a PlayStation to sit indoors alone with. You got your entertainment from mixing with a variety of different people. While making the film, I realised that all of my fondest childhood memories surrounded human contact: mucking about with mates or going camping. In 2007, people put less emphasis on that sort of thing and more on planning their careers and their TV viewing. As far as I'm concerned, if you're working from nine to five then coming home to watch shows that your Sky box has recorded for you while you were out, you might as well be on a fucking drip.

This Is England is a snapshot of an era and a life that seems very dated now. It's about sticking up for mates and beliefs.

The gang

This Is England's tight group of mates are stranded in a drab, east Midlands town in 1983. Devoted to sharp dressing, ska music and each other, the warmth and harmony of their gang is threatened by the arrival of Combo - an older skinhead with an angry, racist agenda.

Smell

The gang's token Boy George-alike becomes the object of young Shaun's affections. Kindly, she gives him his first kiss.

Lol

Firm but fair leader of the girl-skins and girlfriend of Woody. Also the subject of unwanted advances from the sociopathic Combo.

Shaun

An isolated 12-year-old whose dad has been killed in the Falklands War. His transformation into a skinhead offers him a whole new life of friendship, DMs and braces.

Milky

The gang's only black member becomes a target of abuse as certain members start to embrace the National Front.

Woody

A warm hearted leader who nurtures Shaun into a fully-fledged skin. He splits from the gang when Combo shows.

· This Is England is out Friday

Jingbang

Best Film i have seen in ages even better than Dead Mans Shoes well worth a look.

Moor Larkin

An hour or two of ugly bald men doing ugly bald things seems unlikely to pack out the multiplexes.....

I get really ticked off when these self-regarding films have titles like This Is England....... why not This Was My England, that way the rest of us are left out of it.......

Skinheads were nasty ugly bald people in the 1970's, long before it became fashionable for them to punch black people. In the 1980's they were just plain outdated - even Slade had given up on them. If this bloke sees them as some sort of English icon, more fool him, but don't drag me into your fantasy mate.

They became such a cliche that they even popped up in a Patrick McGoohan movie. In Of Pure Blood (1986) there was a scene where a bunch of union-jacketed skinheads pick on a Jew on a train and give Nazi salutes: the bizarre thing was this scene was taking place in Germany!! Very odd, and typical of how bald blokes in union jacks (or St. George crosses nowadays) are just sloppy stereotypes.

I also remember the 1980's as a time when the Foreign Secretary resigned after winning a war, as a point of honour and my mum and dad were able to buy their own house and so gain security for the remainder of their lives. Thank god I bought my house a few years ago because the government in the Noughties has just stolen my pension......

I expect this film will be on TV soon. I expect I'll get fed up with it after about half an hour. I just hope people too young to have remembered the Eighties don't believe a scene of it.

Mary Whitehouse

Steve Crook

When he was interviewed he made the point that this is current. Some parts of England are still like this.

Members of the National Front are still often elected for local councils. Admittedly they then usually screw things up in a big way. Either getting a prison sentence or just never doing anything - but people are still supporting them

Steve

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I'm not sure where the title comes from - tho it is the title of a late Clash single.

As for all skinheads being NF racists; I'm afraid that's very wide of the mark and accurately portrayed in the film. The early skinheads were just Mods that didn't buy into the whole fashion obsession and probably had a greater liking for Ska music. The early 2Tone concerts were living proof but with success came infiltration by the NF elements. The film portrays both elements and certainly doesn't glorify the racists.

Regarding Maggie (spit) and the 80s, the opening credits are a montage of newsreel clips; firstly Duran Duran, Di & Charles' wedding, but then images of Greenham Common, Orgreave, inner city rioting and the Falklands. It's set in the inner city and follows a young boy who has lost his father in combat so is hardly going to be the celluloid Hugh Grant vision of England.

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Council vetoes censors' decision

Bristol City Council has overruled film censors to allow under-18s to see the new Shane Meadows film This Is England.

The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) had given the film an 18 certificate because it contained a scene of racist violence.

Although local authorities have the power to set their own classifications, this is only done on rare occasions.

It is not a common occurrence for local authorities to set their own classifications, but they are certainly within their rights to do so
BBFC spokesman

Councillor Ron Stone added: "It was a unanimous decision of the committee that there was nothing we saw in the film which was any worse than you would see probably on Channel 4 or one of the main TV channels at peak-time viewing.

"We felt it was idiotic that what is basically a very good film and very well made, on a difficult but social issue, should be prevented from being seen by the audience it was targeted at.

"I think the censors actually are wrong in giving it an 18 certificate."

The film stars newcomer Thomas Turgoose as a lonely schoolboy whose soldier father was killed in the Falklands War.

He is taken under the wing of an older gang which is true to the original skinhead movement, influenced by the ska and reggae movements.

Thomas Turgoose in This is England
Star Thomas Turgoose would be too young to watch the film in a cinema

But the gang falls under the influence of a National Front supporter recently released from prison, and the film climaxes in a race attack.

Other councils across the UK are now understood to be following Bristol's lead include the local authority in Grimsby, Turgoose's home town.

The schoolboy is 15 so is unable to see his own performance at the cinema.

The BBFC said it was a "borderline" 15/18 rated film but had been given the higher classification because of the race attack scene and its accompanying language.

"What we are concerned about is young people seeing this in a context where they are not in a position to discuss the issues, and where it may come across as more attractive than offensive," said a spokeswoman.

"It is not a common occurrence for local authorities to set their own classifications, but they are certainly within their rights to do so."

Moor Larkin

I had to smile to myself last evening, when Kirsty Wark mentioned this on Newsnight Review. She ad-libbed that anyone under 18 should get themselves off to Bristol........... I wondered how many people under 18 she thinks watch "Newsnight Review"......

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