It's a small world...

This is the video to Arctic Monkeys' song When The Sun Goes Down - and it is the nexus of many connections. Firstly, it stars Lauren Socha as the girl, who plays Kelly in Misfits. Lauren Socha's brother, Michael, plays Harvey the school bully in This Is England and reprises the role as part of the gang in This Is England '86. He stars in both of those Shane Meadows productions along with Stephen Graham, who plays the pimp in When The Sun Goes Down. Graham also features in the video to Arctic Monkeys' Fluorescent Adolescent, which was directed by Richard Ayoade from The IT Crowd and produced by Warp Films, which also released This Is England.

It is a small world, isn't it?

Shane Meadows

We will be using Shane Meadows' This is England 86 to explore the representation of people, places and period. I like alliteration, you see.

There is a wealth of material accompanying the series out there on the internet, and those helpful people at http://www.shanemeadows.co.uk/ have helpfully collected them all together. The posts for 18th October, 10th October, 7th and 3rd of September contain some excellent links to articles and interviews conducted to promote the Channel 4 premiere of the series. Please look through the collected articles and collect any statements or quotations that you think will help you to write about the representation of people, places and period in the series - because, eventually, that is what you are going to have to do! Remember, when you collect the articles either in a Word or PowerPoint document, to record the sources (you could do this as a hyperlink) - this is good practice for research and you will need to attribute the quotations in your final assessement.

Other than that, just enjoy - or marvel at, as parts of it are really not enjoyable - the brutality, sensitivity, the truth and emotional depth of the whole This Is England project. A modern masterpiece.