Shane Meadows, chronicler of England's public and personal stories

Many directors have used television as a route to making movies. Shane Meadows, though, has maximised his career and impact by moving from big screen to small.

After a number of low-budget British films – including the coming-of-age stories A Room for Romeo Brass (1999) and Dead Man’s Shoes (2004) - Meadows made, in 2006, This is England, a drama exploring skinhead culture in the early 80s. It had some success in cinemas, but now seems most important as the platform for three TV sequels that revisited the young working-class characters – including Meadows’ alter-ego, Shaun Fields, played by Thomas Turgoose – in later parts of the Thatcher era: This is England ’86, This is England ’88 and – due on Channel 4 next month – This is England ’90.

What is about to become the Fields quartet is a combination of public and private history. Each instalment begins with archive montage of the pop, politics, clothes, cars and sport of the era being recreated before picking up on the lives of the recurring characters. Elements that seem clearly to come from the director’s own past – troubled schooling, involvement in petty crime, membership of musical clans – are set alongside larger political and cultural currents.

Winning three Bafta awards – including best mini-series in 2012 – the show has consolidated the opinion that Meadows, 42, is the successor to Mike Leigh and Ken Loach as a creator of hyper-realistic contemporary social British drama.

The title of one early Meadows film – Once Upon a Time in the Midlands (2002) – could serve as the subtitle for most of the others, which have generally been set in the central belt of England, where Meadows was born. He was a Boxing Day baby in 1972, in Uttoxeter, Staffordshire, the son of a lorry-driver and a shop assistant.

A key formative influence occurred at the age of 10, when Meadows’s father discovered the body of the murdered 11-year-old schoolgirl, Susan Maxwell, beside the A518 in Staffordshire. Because of the convention that the person who reports a corpse often becomes a person of interest to the investigation, the senior Meadows was wrongly identified as a possible suspect, leading his son to suffer abuse and accusation at school. That incident appears in disguise in the original film of This is England, in which the pre-pubescent Shaun Fields takes on bullies who have denigrated the memory of his war-hero father.

After leaving school before his GCSEs, Meadows eventually took advantage of the start of the video revolution in cheap and easy film-making to shoot a series of shorts that won him the backing for Small Time (1996), a feature-length debut about young Midlands criminals.

In a manner more usual in theatre than cinema, the director prefers to work with a rotating repertory company of core actors. Among them is Jo Hartley, whom he met in circumstances as far from Meadovian social realist cinema as it is possible to imagine, when she auditioned for a TV commercial for the Sun newspaper that he was directing as one of the mortgage-paying projects that even auteurs sometimes accept. Meadows is less precious than some directors about how his work is funded, his 2008 film Somers Town having been funded by Eurotunnel. After Hartley had successfully shown the ability to sing “It’s Raining Men!” in the back of a taxi while pretending to be blind drunk, Meadows has sent her a succession of scripts, including her signature role of Cynthia Fields, Shaun’s mum, in the This is England series.

As a director, she says, Meadows is “very kind. When I started, I was insecure because I hadn’t been to drama school. But he made it clear that he had complete confidence in me to do it.” She has never seen him lose his temper or be brusque during a shoot but says he “can sometimes be very focused. He’s not a people-pleaser: everything he does is aimed at getting the result he wants.”

Strikingly – because it is an uncommon tribute in the often brutal world of film-making – the dramatist Jack Thorne, co-writer of the TV This is England, also applies to Meadows an adjective more often applied to nurses and samaritans: “He’s kind in usual ways and unusual ways and will catch you unawares with it. He likes doing funny voices when he leaves voice messages: I’ve had quite a few cowboys, some singing strippers, all sorts.”

But Thorne also mentions the director’s intense attention to a project: “He works really hard and really worries about his work – he’s a man that doesn’t really sleep when he’s filming and yet he can seem like the most relaxed man on set. And when he’s concentrating on you and what you’re saying – he listens that hard that you feel like he’s glued to your brain.”

The frequent critical comparison with the work of Loach and Leigh results from the fact that a Meadows film looks as if it is happening rather than being acted. An instruction that Meadows gave Jo Hartley when they first worked together – “Don’t try to act” – certainly echoes accounts of the tactics of those directors. Reports of Meadows’ methods, though, suggest that he combines a central working principle of Loach – casting non-professional actors – with Leigh’s favoured technique of building characterisation though improvisation. Meadows begins, though, with a fully-written script, on which he usually works with someone else: in cinema, Paul Fraser, and, on TV, Thorne.

Jo Hartley says that, after the actors have rehearsed the written script, Meadows will ask them to discuss the content of the conversation or improvise dialogue, in a process calculated to remove anything that sounds remembered or rehearsed. “Sometimes,” Hartley says, “Shane will whisper a new line in the ear of one of the actors before the take so that he gets a totally fresh delivery and real surprise from the person listening.”

Thorne attests to this quest for authenticity: “He watches so carefully and really listens – and if something’s not working – he’ll dump it and find something new. He finds performances in actors I don’t think anyone else could because he’s always telling them to find the truth in something whatever that means for the story he’s telling.”

Although Thorne clearly adores working with Meadows, not all writers would be robust enough to survive the feedback routine. “I always remember in the This Is England ‘86 read-through him leaning across during episode 3 and writing ‘this is shit’ on one page and then ‘isn’t it boring?’ on the page opposite. He was totally right, of course. And we spent the night re-writing it and in the morning he was happy.”

The director is smart enough to know that giving the protagonist of This is England the doubly punning name of “Shaun Fields” invites identification with himself, but the series is not simply a matter of CV becoming TV. Thorne’s increasing involvement means that the series automatically becomes biographical as well as autobiographical and also often completely fictional.

“It’s strange the Shane Meadows/Shaun Fields thing,” says Thorne. “Because yes, Shane is Shaun, but also [the actor] Thomas Turgoose is Shaun. When Thomas is doing it in the scene he’s taking it another way and that other way is right for this character now. You’d have to ask Shane how close it goes to his life, I know it gets very close at times, but it also does its own thing because of Thomas and the story.”

Similarly, Hartley says that Cynthia Fields “certainly is Shane’s mum, but also my mum. We got out photograph albums and old cine movies and talked about our memories of our childhoods”.

The inevitable risk of autobiographical fiction is that the years depicted eventually catch up with the years lived and the next test of Meadows is how he deals with this without making movies about movie directors.

“So far,” says Jo Hartley, “he has mainly drawn on his own life. I think he’ll go on to make very different types of films in the future, but I’d love to be involved. Those of us who have worked on This is England are very close: we’ve grown up together. Shane was the catalyst for us doing what we’ve always wanted to do.”

It has been reported, apparently with the approval of Meadows, that This is England ’90 will bring his social history of the Midlands children of Thatcher to a close. “That’s up to Shane,” says Thorne. “What I can tell you is, if he ever wanted to do another one, I don’t think there’s a single person on the production who wouldn’t want to work on it with him and consider it the greatest honour.”

Potted profile

Born 26 December, 1972
Age 42
Career After a troubled adolescence, he turned from cinema-goer to film-maker, shooting 30 shorts and then a run of features. This is England, in 2006, launched the semi-autobiographical Shaun Fields.
High point Made over 10 years, his This is England quartet – the original film supplemented by three for Channel 4 – paints a remarkable picture of the 80s.
Low point The educational, social and financial struggles of his teens, which much of his work explores in some form.
He says “We were on set, at this block of flats, and this car pulled up and these lads were rowing, some fallout about a girl. We were all watching and laughing, thinking it was like Jeremy Kyle live. But then this guy went to the back of his car and pulled a knife out.”
They say “His films play so close to home that you feel not only as if you’re wandering about his own backyard but that you’re privy to the details of his private life.” – Time Out