RUDEBOYS AND REBELS (THIS TOWN)

There's been plenty of movies and TV dramas about Country, Punk, Rap, Folk, Disco, Soul, Blues, Indie and Dance.

However 'Peaky Blinders' creator Steven Knight has spotted a clear gap in the market for music genre dramas.

Up until now there's been no attempt to really get to grips in a TV drama or movie with the massive influence of Ska and Two Tone on British popular culture.

At its height in the 1980s, Ska and Two Tone was a clear riposte to Margaret Thatcher's Britain.

The music was relevant, it was very political and it was multicultural - providing a robust challenge to the far right rhetoric of groups like the National Front.

Bands like Coventry's The Specials and The Selecter, Birmingham's The Beat and London's Madness and Bad Manners rode high in the charts.

However the long term impact of their appearances on shows like 'Top of the Pops' cannot be underestimated.

Blur and Gorillaz lead singer Damon Albarn has been especially effusive in his praise of Terry Hall and The Specials, collaborating with the band's now sadly departed frontman on several occasions.

At the height of her fame, Amy Winehouse also acknowledged The Specials' influence, performing alongside them at Glastonbury - as did Lily Allen.

Even during The Police's ascent to chart domination, Sting was quick to acknowledge the influence of The Beat in his band's video for 'Don't Stand So Close To Me,' sporting one of their t-shirts.

Years later, the Pet Shop Boys paid tribute to Madness, recording 'My Girl' after performing it live with Suggs.

With its defiant stance against racism and Thatcherism, Ska and Two Tone has always felt like fertile ground for any dramatist.

Enter screen right Steven Knight, a dramatist who is not afraid to tackle big themes in populist dramas and fashion them around great music.

But is Knight really up to the task of doing Ska and Two Tone justice in his new BBC1 six episode TV drama 'This Town'?

'This Town' focuses on Levi Brown's Dante Williams, a young man of West Indian and Irish heritage in Birmingham with an itch to write poetry.

A bit obsessive in nature, he's a talented footballer who has turned his back on a trial with Birmingham City to concentrate on his education.

When he is not crafting poetry on the streets of Birmingham in his duffel coat, Dante is revelling in the music and lyrics of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen.

He initially falls for Freya Parks' record shop worker Fiona but suffers a blow when his attempt to ask her out on a date gets knocked back.

At the start of the series, Dante stumbles upon a riot in his home city while across the Irish Sea his brother, Gregory is serving in the British Army and encountering rioters on Belfast's Falls Road.

During the Birmingham riot, Dante runs into Eve Austin's Jeannie Keefe and the two of them hide out in the back yard of someone's two up, two down house until the disturbances die down.

Jeannie thinks Dante is weird and she has solid grounds for believing so.

After all, he has an alarming tendency to hang around motorway bridges, perching on their fences.

She spots he also has a natural flair for writing lyrics and pitches to him the idea of them joining forces in a Two Tone band, with her writing the music.

Meanwhile in Belfast, Gregory also seems to take insane risks.

He particularly alarms members of his platoon when he wanders out of their Army Saracen and onto the Falls Road in the early hours of the morning without his helmet on just to listen to birdsong.

Meanwhile Dante and Gregory's cousin, Ben Rose's Bardon Quinn is living in a household tormented by his father, Peter McDonald's Eamonn's obsession with Irish republicanism.

A member of the Coventry battalion of the IRA, Eamonn leans on Bardon to join them - making him launder red diesel and later forcing him to phone in a bomb warning about devices planted in a train station.

Eamonn's fanaticism and his obsession with offloading his Irish republican beliefs onto Bardon concerns his nan, Geraldine James' Marie who goes to see a priest with IRA connections to ask if he can help persuade the Provisionals to leave her grandson alone.

When she is threatened in her home by Seainin Brennan's hardline IRA activist Mrs Porter, Marie drops dead afterwards.

Dante and his dad, Nicholas Pinnock's Born Again Rover plant worker and ex-alcoholic, Deuce Williams travel from Birmingham to Coventry to attend the funeral.

Gregory also returns from his Tour of Duty for the burial but when British intelligence spots Eamonn and other Irish republican activists in attendance, he is offered a chance to leave the Army if he can pass on information about IRA operatives in the English Midlands.

Realising Eamonn is trying to suck his cousin Bardon into the Provisionals, Gregory uses him as his source while promising him an escape from paramilitarism.

Bardon and Dante also reconnect, with the latter recruiting his cousin to the band because of his excellent singing voice.

Eamonn's ex-wife and Bardon's mum, Michelle Dockery's Estella has a peach of a voice too, which she gets to exercise at Marie's Requiem Mass, but she is also struggling with drug addiction and alcoholism.

Deuce, however, takes her under his wing but this enrages Eamonn who suspects they are romantically involved and stills harbours feelings for her despite treating her badly.

Now that he is back in Birmingham, Gregory is forging a new life as a Thomas Shelby-style gangster, playing all sides including local IRA commanders, David Dawson's club owner and underworld figure Robbie Carmen and British intelligence.

With Fiona and Shyvonne Ahmadd's talented, heroin addicted drummer Matty on the fringes of the band, Gregory, who is reinventing himself as Virgil, realises they have something that could well take them to the top of the charts.

He recognises in Dante, in particular, lurks a lyrical genius.

Soon Gregory/Virgil is assuming the role of the band's manager, while Bardon is plunged into a IRA honeytrap operation that could lead to the assassination of a gay minister in the Thatcher Government.

Can Bardon avoid being destroyed by his flirtation with the IRA and his dad's fixation with Irish republicanism?

Will Gregory/Virgil emerge with his life intact while building his own career?

Can Dante find his creative voice with the help of Jeannie, Bardon, Fiona and Matty and make it on to 'Top of the Pops'?

Will Robbie Carmen ever get the astronaut suit back that was looted from his previous club?

After that synopsis, let's double back to our original question.

Is 'This Town' up to the task of properly documenting the cultural significance of Ska and Two Tone to British music and popular culture?

Unfortunately, the answer is no.

It falls way short and a lot of that is down to a terrible script.

Knight is one of those infuriating screenwriters who when he's on song is great but who has a tendency more often than not to wander out of tune.

While 'Peaky Blinders' was a cultural phenomenon boosted by some standout central performances from the likes of Cillian Murphy, Helen McCrory and Sam Neill, it was also incredibly uneven.

Some series - notably the early ones - towered over the much weaker later ones which really stretched credibility as they drew on Irish and international political events.

'Peaky Blinders' gave rise to concerns that Knight was more intoxicated by style over substance.

The Tom Hardy led adventure series 'Taboo' showed some promise but his small screen adaptations of Charles Dickens' 'A Christmas Carol' and 'Great Expectations' seemed to confirm fears about Knight's limitations as a screenwriter.

Knight's forays into cinema have been similarly patchy.

'Locke' with Tom Hardy was an inventive and taut domestic drama set within the confines of a car.

However the bizarre thriller 'Serenity' with Matthew McConaghey and Anne Hathaway and his COVID drama 'Locked Down' with Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor were just plain nonsense.

Unfortunately for the viewer 'This Town' suffers from the worst traits of Knight's screenwriting.

While it is solidly directed by Paul Whittington, the show is consistently undermined by ear scraping dialogue, exaggerated characters and some frankly unbelievable moments of supposed high drama.

A Requiem Mass is interrupted for a rendition of 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow' in a desperate attempt to curry audience favour with what Knight thinks is "a moment".

In reality, it turns out to be as embarrassing as David Brent's terrible dance in the original BBC version of 'The Office'.

Early on a Belfast woman appears to direct a racial slur at Gregory during a riot on the Falls Road, only to rather jarringly explain when she said black she was referring to the "Black and Tans".

We're also subjected at one point to Jeannie talking to God in an empty church as she wrestles with her remorse over Dante receiving a beating in an underpass.

But that's not all.

As they launder red diesel, Eamonn has a sing off with Bardon in which they ping back and forth snatches of 'The Fields of Athenry' with 'You Can Get It If You Really Want' as if they are in Baz Luhrman's 'Moulin Rouge'.

Yes ladies and gentlemen, all of these things actually happen and it's a shame because these moments really blow 'This Town' off course.

The dialogue seems so written and is far from natural.

Dante comes across like a parody of a street poet, telling everyone who listens to him how he likes to "only write about true things" and how words land in his head "like pigeons in a tower block" before he eventually bores the arse off everyone with his new found love of hedonism.

Bigging up his gangster credentials, Robbie Carmen toe curlingly describes himself as a "legend of madness".

Talking up his skills as a master manipulator, Gregory/Virgil boasts to his brother how a Machiavellian move involving Bardon has avoided the band's lead singer "being mixed in concrete".

Some of the writing, though, is just lazy.

Set in 1981, at one point we are told about Gregory serving in Belfast, Derry and Drumcree as a soldier.

Funny that, as Drumcree wasn't a marching flashpoint until 1995, so he must have borrowed Doc Brown's De Lorean from 'Back to the Future' to patrol there.

Armagh and Crossmaglen get a mention too but it's as if Knight has thrown darts at a map of Northern Ireland in a desperate bid for authenticity.

A mostly young cast give their all for what should be potentially star making roles but they're fighting a losing battle.

While Brown, Austin, Rose, Parks and Ahmmadd do their best, the more experienced members of the cast flounder in an otherwise decent looking production.

Dockery is hopelessly miscast as Estella while McDonald resorts to a shouty impression of a hardline IRA man.

'Peaky Blinders' alum Bolger tries to do a Cillian Murphy, giving his role plenty of swagger, while Pinnock has little to work with until the last two episodes.

Each episode is gorgeously shot by cinematographer Ben Wheeler and there's a savvy soundtrack that doesn't just consist of Ska, Two Tone or Reggae tracks.

However it's not sufficient to simply rely on great songs by The Specials, Jimmy Cliff, Desmond Dekker, UB40, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Toots and the Maytals, Blondie, Prince Buster, Ray Charles, Gary Numan, The Animals, The Clash, The Selecter, Rainbow, Talking Heads, The Beat and The Velvet Underground.

For 'This Town' to truly convince, it requires believable writing with believable characters and believable dialogue.

Unfortunately with his nonsense IRA, military intelligence and gangland storylines, Knight consistently bungles any attempt to be believable.

Regrettably 'This Town' is just a poorly written show.

If it does somehow get another series, expectations should be so low that it couldn't possibly get any worse.

Or could it?

('This Town' was broadcast on BBC1 from March 31-April 27, 2024, with the full series made available on the BBC iPlayer on March 31, 2024)

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RUDEBOYS AND REBELS (THIS TOWN)

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