Shane Meadows’s second television return to his skinheads is a Christmas story with almost no cheer in it. Vicky McClure, Joe Gilgun and Thomas Turgoose are as good as British television acting gets, and the three episodes are over before you are ready.
Shane Meadows’s This Is England (2006) followed a boy called Shaun through the summer of 1983 and the gang of skinheads who took him in. This Is England ‘86 (2010) moved the story to television and left its characters in a worse place than it found them. ’88 picks them up at Christmas two years on, across three episodes of around 50 minutes, written by Meadows with Jack Thorne, and it is less interested in the gang than in one woman and what two years of carrying a secret have done to her face.
Our verdict is plain. This is the best of the television instalments and one of the finest British dramas of its decade. It is short, it is bleak, and it earns almost all of its bleakness. It carries an 18 certificate and the certificate is not for show.
Vicky McClure’s Lol is the centre of it. She has a baby, a damp flat and a face that has stopped expecting anything. McClure does nearly all of it in silence; she lets the camera sit on her while she does not cry, and the not-crying is harder to watch than tears would be. Joe Gilgun’s Woody has a job, a fiancée and a side parting, and spends the series being funny in rooms where he is plainly terrified. Gilgun’s gift is that the jokes and the fear come out of the same mouth at the same time. Thomas Turgoose’s Shaun is at college now, learning to act, which Meadows plays as both a joke and a hope. Stephen Graham’s Combo has only a handful of scenes, from prison, and is quieter than we have ever seen him.
Danny Cohen shoots it in the grey of an English December: low sun, sodium streetlights, interiors lit by whatever lamp the character could afford. Lol’s flat is the darkest place on screen and he does nothing to brighten it. Jane Levick’s production design gives Woody’s parents a house full of velour and ornaments and gives Lol a cot, a kettle and nothing on the walls. Charlotte Walter has let the clothes go; the sharp cuts and braces of the first film have softened into cardigans, shell suits and one unfortunate office jacket on Woody. Alastair Reid lets the improvised scenes run past the point where a tidier editor would have cut, and the series is better for the slack.
We were wrung out by the end of the second episode, and it was Christmas dinner that did it. Woody sits at his parents’ table with the fiancée beside him, making everyone laugh, and the series keeps cutting back to the flat, where Lol is sitting with the baby and the television and nothing is happening. Meadows holds it. It is the most ordinary picture in the whole series and we found it the hardest to look at, because by then we understood exactly what she was not telling anyone, and that the laughter across town was the sound of a man not asking.
It is not faultless. Johnny Harris returns as Mick, Lol’s father, in scenes we will leave undescribed, and they are the one place Meadows reaches for a device the series does not need. McClure has already shown us everything those visits tell us. Shaun’s strand, the college and the girl in his drama group, is thinner than the rest, and Turgoose is sometimes left holding scenes that do not go anywhere. And the final episode makes its peace a little faster than the first two had led us to expect. We will not say how, only that we believed the misery more than the mercy.
Against Meadows’s own work it sits near the top. Dead Man’s Shoes (2004) was angrier and the first film funnier, but nothing he has made watches a single person as patiently as this watches Lol. Produced by Mark Herbert, it runs about two and a half hours in total and feels longer, in the way a long night does.
Watch it after ’86, not instead of it; the secret at its centre belongs to the earlier series and this one assumes you know it. Then watch all three episodes in one sitting, with the heating on, and do not plan anything cheerful for afterwards.
