In the four years since his film of This Is England, Shane Meadows has been a busy, if relatively marginal filmmaker. There was 2008’s Somers Town – a slight piece with its origins as a promotional piece for the Eurostar – and his mock rock doc from last year, Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee. Initially, then, it could seem strange that his latest work isn’t a new high profile movie but a four-part television series for Channel 4 that finds Meadows revisiting the core characters from This Is England. In fact, television might prove to be a natural home for Meadows. Two of Channel 4’s most successful series – Shameless and Skins –owe some debt to Meadows’ movies. Shameless is a tragic-comic celebration of working class Northern life that chimes particularly with Meadows’ debut, Small Time, and threads in and out of his later work. Skins, meanwhile, feels spiritually close to This Is England; basically, it’s kids getting into scrapes. It comes as little surprise, then, that This Is England 86 is written in collaboration with Jack Thorne, a veteran of both shows. Certainly, Meadows and his characters make a smooth transition to television. In this country, we’re familiar with TV directors like Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Stephen Frears and Danny Boyle making the step up to film making rather than the other way round, a practise that seems to be pretty regular in, say, America – where established movie makers like David Lynch, Kathryn Bigelow and Martin Scorsese have crossed comfortably back and forth between media. In this instance, it’s interesting to see how Meadows handles the episodic nature of TV drama. The first episode is a scene-setter, with Meadows and Thorne conspiring – via a wedding, a beating and a heart attack – to reunite Shaun (Thomas Turgoose) with his former gang, broken up at the end of the original film by the horrific acts of violence perpetrated by Combo (Stephen Graham). It feels very much like a Meadows film – the warmth he has for his characters, the naturalism of the performances, the balance between humour and pathos are all, pleasingly, in place. And it’s pleasant enough to revisit Shaun, Woody, Lol and Milky. When we first meet up with them here, they’re in that difficult, shifting period between adolescence and adulthood, striving to be grown up yet still capable of extremely childish behaviour. The episode arc is, principally, Woody and Lol’s wedding day, with the bride and groom travelling by bus to what looks like a grim school hall that doubles as a registry office. But Woody realises, perhaps too late, that he doesn’t want he and Lol to end up like his parents; Lol, meanwhile, hasn’t even invited hers to the ceremony. Future episodes promise to explore the fall out from this, and how Woody and Lol’s relationship impacts on other gang members. Just as significantly, this first episode also introduces Lol’s estranged father, Mick (Johnny Harris) who we might deduce will fulfil the kind of role traditionally played by Paddy Considine in Meadows films. And then there’s Combo, such a terrifying and disruptive presence in the original film, whose return in future episodes you could presume is inevitable. You might wonder, of course, why Meadows has chosen to revisit these characters. In the production notes handed out at the screening of episode 1, he says, “Audiences seemed to really respond to the characters… Not only did I want to take the story of the gang broader and deeper, I also saw in the experiences of the young in 1986 many resonances to now – recession, lack of jobs, sense of the world at a turning point.” Certainly, This Is England 86 is being set up as one of the big guns in Channel 4's Autumn drama season, and it's easy enough to see why. At the risk of sounding snobbish, Channel 4's over-reliance in recent years on American imports and reality shows feel like they've undermined its early promise as home of great, home-grown drama like Walter, GBH, A Very British Coup and Traffik. These were series that worked brilliantly as both entertainment and also had space to provide greater social, political and economic comment. A function, clearly, Meadows sees This Is England 86 also performing. This Is England ’86 airs on Channel 4 on 7th September and is available to own on DVD from 11th October 2010 courtesy of 4DVD.

For some reason – bias, probably – it feels like it can be harder to track down good British underground artists than American ones. My attempts to put together lists of new British bands I like, for whatever reason, can consequently be a bit harrowing. But the likes of Forest Swords are making the process a fraction easier this year. And over the past couple of weeks or so, a couple more have been flushed out. Beggin’ Your Pardon Miss Joan are a duo of Lex and Vanessa Panayi on Blackest Rainbow, a label I think I last mentioned with regard to some of those Natural Snow Buildings albums/cassettes. There’s an element of that French duo’s misty etherealism to “Edges”, especially what sounds like a shared affection for Flying Saucer Attack and the lo-fi Bristolian psych world that they inhabited. It’s easier, though, to contextualise BYPMJ (not my favourite name, or abbreviation, really) alongside some of the players who used to be called freak/acid folk. Ben Chasny’s Six Organs Of Admittance is perhaps the most obvious influence (listening to “Edges”, I’m thinking something earlyish; “Dark Noontide”, maybe?), and also Hush Arbors. But along with some really lovely, acoustic-led drifts and drones, there are also a few songs, built around airy, sighing harmonies, that are hookier and more memorable than a lot of music which comes to the surface from this scene. “Avon” especially, and “I Am The Messenger”, which reminds me, a little vaguely, of Robbie Basho (“Song For The Queen”?). The vibe gets slightly heavier towards the end of “Edges”, dovetailing nicely into another worthwhile Lex Panayi project, Guanaco. “Sky Burials”, also on Blackest Rainbow, shares similarities with various bits of Chasny’s back catalogue, but is more of a humming, eldritch trip than the generally more beatific “Edges”. Again, it’s a strong set, intstrumental this time, with Panayi stretching out his fingerpicking technique more expansively. Looking for British comparisons, we could probably work with some of Voice Of The Seven Thunders’ Rick Tomlinson’s solo acoustic work (like the live one on Kning Disk), possibly C Joynes. Or, at a push, Dean McPhee, who’s also just come onto my radar, his “Brown Bear” having come out a while back on a label called Hood Faire, but now reissued on Blast First Petite. Weirdly, I’ve just this moment noticed that the first track on “Brown Bear” is called “Sky Burial”, which suggests a certain collective underground subconscious, or at least that both players are circling the same cosmic drain. No matter. Again, this discreet three-tracker is a genuine find, with McPhee – from Bingley, according to his Myspace – specialising in expansive solo guitar meditations that sit nicely with other stuff mentioned here. That said, McPhee is a fractionally less psychedelic, more conventionally lyrical player, and the three instrumentals on “Brown Bear” come cloaked in a load of reverb which tends to fill in the atmospheres where drones would be on the Panayi albums. I’m struggling to place exactly what this one reminds me of: the allegiances to the New American Primitive school are much, much fainter, and the folk strain is played down, though I do keep thinking of John Renbourn, imprecisely. Please have a listen to both of them - Dean McPhee here and Beggin’ Your Pardon Miss Joan and Guanaco here – and let me know what you think.