This Is England

Shane Meadows' This Is England won the BAFTA for Best British Film at the 61st BAFTAs in February 2008, the first of four BAFTAs the property would collect across its film and subsequent television-spinoff series. The original feature also won the British Independent Film Award for Best British Independent Film in 2006 and the FIPRESCI Prize at Rome Film Festival the same year.

The film is largely autobiographical: Meadows grew up in Uttoxeter in Staffordshire in exactly the period the film depicts and was, like the central young protagonist Shaun, drawn briefly into a skinhead group as an early-teenager in the early 1980s. Meadows has spoken openly in interviews about basing the more menacing character Combo on a real older skinhead figure he had encountered in the period, and about the film as in part an attempt to process that personal history.

The cast pairs Thomas Turgoose, then twelve and in his screen debut, with Stephen Graham, Joe Gilgun, Andrew Shim, Vicky McClure, Rosamund Hanson and Jo Hartley. Most of the cast had worked previously with Meadows on his earlier features A Room for Romeo Brass (1999) and Dead Man's Shoes (2004); the ensemble would return for the four follow-up Channel 4 mini-series (This Is England '86, '88, '90) extending the property's narrative across nearly a decade of output. The series swept multiple BAFTAs across its run, with McClure and Graham going on to substantial subsequent careers (McClure in Line of Duty, Graham in Boiling Point and The Virtues, and most prominently in Stephen Graham's later collaborations with Meadows including the 2023 series The Gallows Pole).