Streaming on SBS on Demand - Rod Bishop is underwhelmed by THIS TOWN (Steven Knight, UK, 2024)

Jordan Bolger, Levi Brown, This Town

The copious, eclectic credits amassed by British screenwriter Steven Knight makes for interesting reading.

There’s an Oscar nomination early in his career for Dirty Pretty Things, directed by Stephen Frears; there’s his television hit as a co-creator of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?; there’s a brutal London crime families tale for David Cronenberg in Eastern Promises; there’s Locke, a film set entirely in a car driven by Tom Hardy, written and directed by Knight; dockside shipping tussles in the early 1800s in Taboo, co-created with Tom Hardy and Chips Hardy; Kristen Stewart as Lady Di in Spencer; two badly received ‘re-imaginings’ of Charles Dickens (A Christmas Carol and Great Expectations); the Birmingham crime gangs in six seasons of Peaky Blinders; the berserk British soldiers in the North Africa campaign against Rommel in the awful SAS Rogue Heroes; the misjudged World War II romance between a blind French girl and a German soldier in All The Light We Cannot See. 

And now, This Town, set in Birmingham and Coventry in the Midlands during the Thatcher era and backgrounded by a predominately ska, reggae and two-tone soundtrack.

Knight’s credit list is not unlike his compatriot, the equally prolific Jack Thorne, who has written 26 times for television (excluding multiple seasons) and 12 feature films since 2006. Knight has written 21 times for television (excluding multiple seasons) and 18 feature films since 1990.

It’s industrial-scale screen writing with no hint of writer’s block, but the sheer output of material suggests it is likely to be uneven.

So, it is with This Town. There are plenty of moments reminiscent of Peaky Blinders, but Knight has a lot to cram in – the IRA, Thatcher, racism, skinheads, hard-drugs, soft drugs, alcohol, romance, reggae, dub, virginity, ska, two-tone, poetry, Christianity, skinheads and the formation of a band. He just can’t keep it all together.

While the lack of coherence is annoying, the sheer scale of his undertaking is often admirable.  What grates, however, is when the writing smacks of being a first draft. The central character, for instance, is the mixed-race Dante who creates song lyrics from his poetry. Apparently written by Kae Tempest, the poetry is terrible: “The words come and land in my skull like a flock of pigeons on a tower block.”

Dante’s band Fuck The Factory - with music written by producer Dan Carey - slowly comes together through the six episodes, finally closing the series with their first live gig. Their music is not only as unimpressive as the poetry, but it doesn’t sound remotely like the rest of the great music on the soundtrack – The Selector, The Beat, Stiff Little Fingers, Siouxsie and The Banshees, The Specials, Prince Buster, Jimmy Cliff, Bob Marley, UB40, Jackie Wilson, Blondie, Tom Jones, Talking Heads etc. 

This soundtrack is beautifully selected and originates from a specific time and place, but like the writing, can also abruptly veer off course. For instance, why does a demo version of Rock & Roll by The Velvet Underground from 1970 suddenly pop up? Great song, but 1970 New York is a long way from the reggae, ska and two-tone of Birmingham and Coventry in the early 1980s.

Michelle Dockery

Among the supporting cast, there is one show-stopping performance from Michelle Dockery (Lady Mary from Downton Abbey) playing an alcoholic mother who crashes her own mother’s funeral to sing a solo version of Over The Rainbow.

This Town occasionally has moments when it touches that rainbow. Pity there are so few of them.