31 March 2024

Interview with This Town creator, writer and executive producer, Steven Knight

How would you set the scene for This Town?

The setting and backdrop for This Town is 1981, Birmingham and Coventry. ‘81 was a time of turmoil and change in every sense - in society, in politics but in music as well. This series opens with a riot and I hope the sense of ‘riot’ continues throughout the whole thing. The riot was a real thing, it happened in Handsworth, Birmingham and I’ve used that to introduce four very different characters who will come together.

You might say it’s about music or it’s about people who are drawn to a certain type of music, but I’ve tried not to do that. I didn’t really want to do a thing about people who form a band, which is part of what it is, I wanted to create a group people who have no choice other than to form a band because all the other options are so bleak. Having said that I hope ‘bleak’ isn’t a word that people use to describe this, because what I’m trying to do is meet these people living their lives on big, sprawling housing estates in the early 80s and it’s beautiful. The place is beautiful. The series is not trying to say ‘isn’t it awful’.

Why did you want to write this story?

I wanted to do something partly from my own experience, as I grew up in an environment not entirely dissimilar. The music was around at the time and for us it was ‘other’, it was different and everyone liked it. I’m not trying to set out to make a political or social point at all, but at this time a particular thing happened where a particular type of music attracted equally black and white people. They danced to and made that music together, not in order to prove a point and not as a consequence of any sort of pressure but because that’s just what happened. I thought that was quite an important thing to illustrate.

It’s depicting working class life without any sense of sorrow or pity and, rather than that, seeing the glory and the glamour of it. I’ve always thought motorways at night are very beautiful so the M6 is a big character in this, and - not necessarily to live in but to look at - huge, big tower blocks, looking down from the top to the rest of the world. I wanted to get all of that in. Luckily our brilliant director Paul Whittington has made it look like a painting.

What is it that draws the characters together to form the band?

They’re drawn together - some of them because they live on the same estate, two of them (Dante and Bardon) because they’re cousins. They’re having their totally different lives, but they’re hard lives that they have to get out of.

We’ve got the poet Dante, played by Levi Brown, who is troubled by the gift he has and the words that come to him. He needs to get them out and it’s not an environment where people write poetry, typically. Bardon is a dancer and singer of Irish ballads, and music and dance competitions are really important in his Irish community. The music in that community, especially at that time, was about their struggle and the political situation. So you have these two people who feel words and music.

None of the characters are brilliant musicians but they have to learn and, bit by bit, they realise the way of getting this all out is via music. I’ve tried to construct it so the jeopardy they’re in is such that, as the script says, the only way they’re going to survive is to get famous, so that’s what they try to do.

How did it feel when the cast came together and started to embody the characters you had on the page?

It was a very specific moment actually - it was at the readthrough of the first episode, when everyone got together to read the script out loud, but they didn’t yet know each other. Readthroughs can be quite awkward and nervous, but this one just sang. They weren’t all sat near together but they were connected in a way.

You could really feel the humour which is the most difficult thing in a readthrough, because it’s hard to get ‘funny’ in a place like that. But the humour was coming through, they all got it, and when the line was ironic they knew it was ironic. That’s when I thought “wow, this is really something”.

What part does music play for different characters?

For each character there is a role for music. For Bardon music for him is this Irish rebel music, it represents what his dad does, the danger, the jeopardy and the thing he doesn’t want. For Dante it’s words and he can’t cope with how they come to him, he needs to get them away.

For Deuce, Dante’s dad who is a preacher, there is gospel music which for him is the lifeline to save him from addiction. Estella, Bardon’s mum, could’ve made it in the 60s and 70s, because she is a brilliant singer – and luckily Michelle Dockery is also a brilliant singer. For Estella music is what might’ve been. It’s a different thing for all of them but it fits when they all come together.