THIS TOWN, THE GENTLEMEN review.

Writer Steven Knight’s Peaky Blinders was a phenomenally successful, Birmingham-set crime saga that ran for six series between 2013 and 2022. When it was announced that Knight’s next project, This Town, would be set in politically raw, early 1980s Birmingham, married to a soundtrack of ska, reggae and songs from the 2-Tone record label, there was considerable excitement and media interest.

I was very excited: I remember 2-Tone well – the energy of the gigs, the sharp-suited fashions, the socially observant lyrics and the volatile political background the bands like the Specials and The Selecter drew from. I think it may well have been 2-Tone that introduced me to racial issues. I don’t remember any of awareness of it before that. I still believe in the label’s principles of racial integration to this day.

This Town starts in fine style, as you'd expect from Knight. A Molotov cocktail hurtles at the viewer and the camera pulls back to reveal a race riot in which the police are clearly on the offensive. Dreamy, moody poet Dante Williams (Levi Brown, above) is caught up in the violence and is on the receiving end of some shocking police racism – an officer replies to Dante’s explanation that he’s going home with “it’s a long way back to the fucking jungle, son,” before flooring the boy with a blow from his truncheon. The scene is a brilliant opening statement of This Town’s gloves-off examination of the past.

At first, Dante appears to be driving the story – his poetry forms the basis of the songs for a band he forms with the feisty skinhead Jeannie (Eve Austin) and Irish student Bardon (Ben Rose). Meanwhile, Dante’s older brother Gregory (Jordan Bolger) is having problems with the army in Belfast, abandoning his patrol to listen to birdsong. So far so good – the lead actors all radiate commitment, believability and charisma and there’s a brilliant soundtrack, which in one scene rather cleverly juxtaposes the opposing viewpoints of Bardon and his IRA father: the latter sings an Irish rebel song, while his son counters with Jimmy Cliff’s ‘You Can Get It If You Really Want’.

For such a gritty drama the imagery sometimes verges on the surreal, primarily thanks to a Russian space suit purchased by the wonderfully psychotic club owner/gangster Robbie Carmen (David Dawson, rocking the look of an evil Paul Weller). The suit almost becomes a character in its own right, accompanying Jeannie and Dante in a van and hitch-hiking with him to Carmen’s club. The suit features throughout the series and is used symbolically, by turns representing Dante’s desire to escape and silent strength during trying times. Briefing his drug dealers, Carmen orders them to follow the spaceman’s example: “He does not laugh, he does not cry, he expresses no opinions, he offers no objections, he simply stands in the place where I put him.”

The symbolic allusions don’t stop there. Dante is named after the writer of the 14th century poem The Divine Comedy, in which a fictional avatar of the writer journeyed through Hell – an appropriate parallel with a Birmingham full of racist police, violent skinheads and a construction industry in the pocket of the IRA. Dante’s guide was the Roman poet Virgil, which just happens to be the nickname of Jordan (below, middle), who looks after his brother as he navigates Birmingham’s gangland.

Three quarters of the way through the first episode, This Town is shaping up as a rich, vivid, cultural brew with an enviable attention to detail (1981-specific LPs by The Slits and Psychedelic Furs are seen lining the walls of a record shop, for example). When Dante’s grandmother (Geraldine James) dies, there was a small narrative red flag for me: it’s revealed that, rather conveniently, the lad is Bardon’s cousin. Whichever way you look at it, this is a very easy – or lazy – way of uniting the series’ themes of race and Irish terrorism. Stretching credibility even further, Dante’s father, Deuce (a dignified Nicholas Pinnock) works at the strike-hit British Leyland factory in Longbridge, adding industrial unrest to Knight’s checklist of 1981 must-have subjects.

The level of coincidence ramps up in the second episode. Attending his gran’s funeral, Jordan is photographed by Special Branch and threatened with imprisonment for associating with known IRA members, including Bardon’s dad, unless he agrees to spy on them. If Jordan refuses, the engagingly ruthless Commander Bentley (the excellent John Heffernan) promises that Bardon will be framed for an IRA bomb attack on Coventry railway station.

From Dante initially being the series’ focus, his brother steps increasingly into the limelight as the series progresses. Unfortunately, this is the weakest aspect of This Town: while there are any number of harrowing dramatic possibilities in being a Special Branch informer, Jordan easily outwits Bentley and the IRA, and you never really believe he’s in any danger from either; he certainly doesn’t behave as if he is. The scene that ties up this narrative thread clumsily attempts to connect the IRA and forming-a-band storylines and, in doing so, unfortunately comes across as ludicrous.

The last episode is a long way from the accomplished social realism of the first. The overall impression you’re left with is of a bizarre, gangland version of The Partridge Family, as most of the major characters related to Dante and Bardon’s families become involved with the band. True, This Town features some stunning set pieces – Bardon tearing around his estate to find a phone box that hasn’t been vandalised so he can phone in a warning about a bomb about to explode, Bardon’s  alcoholic mum, Estella (Michelle Dockery), singing a moving version of ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’ at her mother’s funeral, the normally placid Dante punching out several skinheads in The Trooper pub…

But the series could have been so much more. Even Dante’s band, unimaginatively christened Fuck The Factory, gives into cliche, with Dante as the misfit, poetic genius (think Ian Curtis and Morrissey), Jeannie as the sensible one (Johnny Marr, John Squire) and a drugged-up loose cannon of a drummer, Matty (Shyvonne Ahmmad; hello Keith Moon and John Bonham). When Commander Bentley, the main villain of the piece, cheerily complements Bardon on how good his band is sounding, you know something’s gone seriously wrong somewhere. And I’m not convinced that the bland song FTF play at the end would have encouraged an instant stage invasion.

Tonally, This Town is all over the place: it starts like a frontline TV news report from 1981, and finishes with an everything-worked-out-alright-didn’t-it? scene that the kids from Fame would have happily embraced.

The unwieldy series could learn a lot from Netflix’s The Gentlemen. It’s not remotely realistic, but, from start to finish, everyone in it is directed to play the heightened, blackly comic mix of crime, aristocracy, boxing, travellers and drugs as if they believe it.

The premise is simple but rather fun: Ex-soldier Eddie Horniman (Theo James, above right) inherits the dukedom of Halstead House, and discovers that his father had swelled the estate’s coffers via a profitable marijuana farm under the stables. He becomes involved with Susie Glass (Kaya Scoderalrio, convincingly ruthless, above left), who represents the interests of the crime family cultivating the weed, the patriarch of which, perhaps inevitably, is played by Ray Winstone.

The Gentlemen is the usual Guy Ritchie gangland tosh, given a welcome veneer of sophistication by the country house setting and James’ effortlessly charming, authoritative and assured central performance (if ever there was a candidate for the new James Bond, it’s him). The series doesn’t have the ‘serious drama’ ambitions of This Town; if there is a theme, it’s that everyone, from the aristocracy on down, are all criminals. Because the series is high quality hokum, you can forget the context and wallow in a sea of engaging character turns from the likes of Vinnie Jones, Joely Richardson, Daniel Ings and Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul’s Giancarlo Esposito (in a laugh-out-loud in-joke, he’s dealing crystal meth).

Because The Gentlemen focuses exclusively on crime at all levels of society, the series could be seen as a 21st century heir to Knight’s Peaky Blinders. When you compare the conciseness of Ritchie’s series with Knight’s sprawling, contrived This Town, that’s rather ironic.