This Is England 86 special preview

This Is England '86

This Is England ’86 , the TV series sequel to Shane Meadows' runaway movie hit, is rolling out on Channel 4 this September.

If you just can’t stand to wait that long, and fancy hobnobbing with the cast and crew, a special screening of the first episode will be showing at the Showroom in Sheffield on 2 September.

Introduced by director Shane Meadows, the event will be attended by Thomas Turgoose, Vicky McClure, Andrew Shim and Joe Gilgun, and will recreate that bygone era that style forgot for an evening of ‘80s flavoured revelry.

“When I finished This Is England I had a wealth of material and unused ideas that I felt very keen to take further,” says TF favourite and all-round nice guy Meadows. “Audiences seemed to really respond to the characters we created and out of my long standing relationship with Film4 and Channel 4 the idea for a television serial developed.

“Not only did I want to take the story of the gang broader and deeper, I also saw in the experiences of the young in 1986 many resonances to now – recession, lack of jobs, sense of the world at a turning point. Whereas the film told part of the story, the TV serial will tell the rest.”

Set in – you guessed it – 1986, This Is England ’86 picks up with the lead characters we fell in love with back in 2006’s Britflick and follows their further trials and tribulations over the course of four episodes. That's like four amazing follow-up movies for the price of one.

To find out more about the event, head on over to channel4.com/thisisengland86 .

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Josh Winning has worn a lot of hats over the years. Contributing Editor at Total Film, writer for SFX, and senior film writer at the Radio Times. Josh has also penned a novel about mysteries and monsters, is the co-host of a movie podcast, and has a library of pretty phenomenal stories from visiting some of the biggest TV and film sets in the world. He would also like you to know that he "lives for cat videos..." Don't we all, Josh. Don't we all.