This is England '86

[Stevie B]

Fuck off with your ginger chips Shawn!

[therockbox]

Regarding Combo...

He's back, I think in tomorrow's episode.

[fr34k]

That's awesome rockbox.

I watched the second episode and I'm officially hooked. Still a little sad to see the Skinhead culture seldolmy mentioned, but the episode was awesome and I love where the characters are going.

[therockbox]

Just managed to watch the third episode on 4oD...

That was really hard to watch, knew something was going to happen as soon as she sat down but didn't think we'd see that much. Superbly directed though, and it'll be interesting to see how they wrap everything up next week in an hour, especially with Combo returning (with hair) as well as the rape to deal with.

[Pesci]

Yeah, I think the third one was the best yet. Definitely hard to watch, as you said. So graphic as well. And the way the girl reacted just made the whole thing seem... real. They didn't overdramatise it, they just presented it in such a gritty manner that it struck a chord.

[Pesci]

Just saw the last episode, it was awesome

As I said before, the whole thing has to be viewed together really before I can pass comment on any of the episodes. And as a whole it's fantastic. The first three parts do a great job of building up the last episode and it came together brilliantly. It'd be cool if he did more work with it, releasing a new series every few years. It definitely has huge potential, and there's loads of characters Meadows can still develop.

[therockbox]

The scene with Lol and her dad was horrible to watch. I can't remember watching anything else that's made me feel so, I don't know, grubby I guess. Didn't feel like I was watching a drama at all.

[Pesci]

Yeah, the scenes with Lol's dad have been so realistic. The dialogue really is incredible. I hate dramas with stupidly polished, always amazingly profound dialogue in the intense scenes. It just doesn't do it for me because life isn't like that at all. But with Lol's dad it's proper chilling... the build up of that scene between the two of them was fantastic.

[therockbox]

I think in a lot of the scenes the dialogue is improvised, the actors get given an outline of where the scene needs to go (or anything majorly important that needs to be said/done), but other than that they're allowed to just bounce off each other.

Sometimes it doesn't work particularly well (like in the first episode when Lol and Milky were on the hospital roof - I thought that felt a bit forced and the two seemed a little confused), but in scenes like that it's completely different to the way the majority of shows would have portrayed a scene like that.

[fr34k]

I finally managed to watch the final episode and holy shit, that was amazing. I'm still shaking all over. Stephen Graham was great and I'm glad he was in the show. Whilst I don't identify with any of his previously shown politlcal beliefs, the characters value of friendship and love is unreal. It's a really, really gripping thing to watch. I'm kinda at a lost of words here.

While I still think the Skinhead Culture should have been a much bigger part of the show, I was definitely wrong about the characters alone not managing to tell a good story. Fuck me, this was awesome.

The scenes all seem so realistic to me, it was gruesome to watch at times, but all this managed to get me highly emotional involved in the show. Everybody should see this.

Guys, I'm not kidding, my hands are still shaking and this is definitely one of those shows where I can buy into every emotion portrayed. Awesome.

And fuck, I gotta start watching Boardwalk Empire, I want to see more from Stephen Graham. He is awesome.