Dramatic, urgent and intriguing: BBC1’s This Town reviewed

After conquering the world with Peaky Blinders (and before that by co-creating Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?), Steven Knight was last seen on British television giving us his frankly deranged adaptation of Great Expectations. Happily, he’s now returned to form with a show that, while not a retread exactly, is definitely Peaky-adjacent.

In This Town we’re back in a Birmingham – this time in the 1980s – that’s rundown, riven, violent and soul-stifling, yet that Knight presents with unmistakable love. Nor, once again, is there any escaping the overwhelming power of the family as a blessing and a curse. There’s also the same combination of apparent social realism with something much stranger and more mythical – and not just round the edges, but deep within the programme’s soul.

This is most obvious in the dialogue, which is often heightened to a degree that means nobody would speak it in real life, but which perfectly suits – and helps to create – the show’s overall feel. But it also applies to the characters, who, in a more conventional drama, might seem merely implausible. In this one, they manage to pull off the neat trick of being both far-fetched and somehow archetypal.

Leading the way is the teenage Dante (Levi Brown), who wants to be the new Leonard Cohen, but who in his dreaminess, lack of side and fondness for unrequited love bears an unexpected resemblance to that other Midlands teenager, Adrian Mole. Dante was first seen composing poetry in his head as he wandered unwittingly into the Birmingham riots of 1981 where he was beaten by a racist policeman. Running away, he bumped into the more worldly Jeannie (Eve Austin), who failed to interest him in a joint, listened to his unprompted tales of heartbreak and asked: ‘How’s your gorgeous rock-hard brother?’

And with that we cut to Greg (Jordan Bolger), the brother in question: a soldier in an even more riot-torn Belfast.