Jay Brooks and the cast of This Is England 90 suffered an acute attack of action painting for Shortlist magazine. Thomas Turgoose, Vicky McClure and Joe Gilgun got splattered in a Pollack styled nod to the cover of the first Stone Roses album. Why? Because the series is set against the background of ‘Madchester’ and the rave scene so Stone Roses are, unsurprisingly, a big part of the soundtrack.
This is England 90 is the last installment in director Shane Meadows legendary saga of growing up working class in England in the 1980’s which began with the feature film set in 1983. Although he never planned to make a TV series out of his most successful film, once he’d started doing so, he knew he wanted to get to the 90s. He had a vision of an opening shot of someone putting an ecstasy tablet on to someone else’s tongue.
‘Yeah that does happen.’ he told Miranda Sawyer in The Guardian. ‘There are four episodes in This Is England 90, and the summer episode is when the E thing kicks off. It’s not cool, though. At one point I thought, Yeah, I’ll hire 50,000 extras and get a proper rave going. But then I thought, No. In real life, the first time I went to a rave I got lost and ended up at a Pagan festival by mistake. And This Is England is like an antidote to cool, it’s like, this is what actually happened, and it was a bit wank.’