CHRISTOPHER STEVENS: If this is what the 1980s were really like, maybe they’re best forgotten!

This city

Classification:

Teenagers, do not under any circumstances hold on to your journals and journals as you grow older. Throw them in the trash. If you don’t, one day you will surely suffer unbearable shame. . . Listen to someone read your teenage poetry out loud.

Few things can be scarier. It’s bad enough that your mother discovered those verses when you were 17; How much worse would it be if your own children found them 30 years later?

You can only feel sorry for Dante (Levi Brown), whose poetic inner voice provides the narration for This Town (BBC1), a coming-of-age drama set in the Birmingham and Coventry ska music scene of the early 1980s. .

“I love you baby, I can’t quite say it/If I had a heart, I’d play it,” he recites to himself, wandering heartbroken through the streets of Handsworth after a college girl rejects his request for a date. . .

Dockery with co-star Ben Rose, who plays Brandon Quinn. Steven Knight, the 65-year-old creator of Peaky Blinders, intends this six-part drama to be a loving celebration of the West Midlands.

As he wanders into a street riot, with burning cars and flying bricks, the fool continues: “Before I saw you, I didn’t know/But now I find out I’m not a bad poet.”

Fortunately, at that moment someone throws a Molotov cocktail in Dante’s direction. You can’t say he didn’t deserve it.

Steven Knight, the 65-year-old creator of Peaky Blinders, intends this six-part drama to be a loving celebration of the West Midlands, where he spent his teenage years. He has some fun ideas about nostalgia; What he remembers most fondly is violence and crime. That explains why he revered his fictional gangster clan, the Shelbys.

Dante’s brother Gregory (Jordan Bolger) is caught up in another riot, on the Falls Road in Belfast. Both young people are dreamers and tend to forget fights and listen to birdsong.

Meanwhile, his cousin Michael, a champion Riverdancer in the insular Irish community of Coventry, is being dragged into IRA activity by his leather-clad father, Eamonn (Peter McDonald), who is more interested in the lucrative potential of terrorism. organized than in the bombing. .

Dockery and Rose in this city. There’s a powerful soundtrack by Desmond Dekker, UB40, Toots and the Maytals and other reggae acts of the era.

You might think, with some justification, that the troubled home life of the terrorists and their families is a dubious choice for a BBC drama. Knight is good, however, at depicting the moral complexities of lives caught up in violent crimes without always glorifying them (although he certainly does that at times).

Dante, Gregory and Michael are crazy about music, and there’s a powerful soundtrack by Desmond Dekker, UB40, Toots and the Maytals and other reggae groups of the era.

There are also flashes of bitter humor: a riot girl sets her gasoline-soaked sleeve on fire when she lights a joint, children laugh as a soldier points his rifle at them and shouts: ‘Bang-bang!’

But if this is the best nostalgia 1981 has to offer, perhaps it’s best forgotten.