Too much Too young

Peaky Blinders writer Steven Knight's latest creation This Town takes viewers back to the Midlands of the 80s, telling the story of a group of disenfranchised young people for whom music is the only way out

- Sophie Porter

In 1981, Britain was at crisis point

THE NATION HAD entered the second year of a recession which saw over 2.5 million people standing in line for the dole, and the threat of miners' walkouts and the IRA hunger strikes put maximum pressure on the newly instated Thatcher administration. Tensions were running high, with Black and Asian communities enduring an increase in racist attacks and police harassment as the force exercised hefty misuse of stop-and-search powers. As a result, following April's Brixton Uprising, that summer saw riots rage across the Midlands, Liverpool, Leeds and Manchester.

This is the bleak landscape in which Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight has set This Town, his latest love letter to the Midlands.  While Peaky Blinders touched on similar themes of community, working-class lives and social turbulence, This Town centres on the youth experience in an era much closer to Knight's heart. It features a group of characters he feels he could have grown up with, who demonstrate tenacity in the face of violence and uncertainty.

Set primarily between Coventry and Birmingham, This Town draws us into the world of an extended family and their wider network who are brought back together by the death of a key figure. It focuses on the paths of four young people as they collectively turn to music as a "lifeboat" and form a band. Getting famous is the only option in the face of familial tension, their only means of escaping the desolate destinies of people who come from a very particular kind of place.

ONE OF THE four main characters and band members is Dante Williams, an 18-year-old college student and aspiring poet for whom the adjective 'weird' is thrown around frequently. Played by newcomer Levi Brown, he is seemingly out of step with the rest of the world at a time when visual identity and alignment is vital, but he speaks with conviction and integrity and comes to music as a means of carrying his words.