HOWZAT

The uniform was a Ben Sherman shirt, braces and Doc Marten boots. Only later, with the “second generation”, came the ugly turn to National Front politics, the appropriation of the St George’s flag and violence against “Pakis”. “We were told that black, Asian and Chinese people were evil and stealing jobs. There was a time in my young life when I thought those things were true.”

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But although on one level the film is about 1983, it is also about the present. The title, after all, is This is England, not This Was England. “Oh, completely, yes,” Meadows says. “The film is set in a particular time and place, and is partly about my own experiences. But yeah, it is also about what is happening in our country today.

“What I think I’ve done is to examine things that are still completely valid, looking at the past in a way which shows it’s also about now. I wasn’t trying to be clever, but there was something about that time which allowed me to tell the story without pulling punches.”

The background then was the Falklands War, whereas “now it is Iraq”. For the National Front, read the BNP. “It’s a period film, but the same problems and issues exist today. The character of Shaun is me, but it also draws on Tommo’s experiences.”

Some things have changed, Meadows believes. “We had trouble finding an estate without satellite dishes and double glazing. Unemployment isn’t as bad, and political correctness has kicked in. Take television: 20 years ago white working-class people used words like darkie or spade, and so did Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part, but you couldn’t swear on TV. Now you can swear all you like, but you can’t say wog or coon.”

In the 1980s, he says, immigrants, especially the Asians, were much more passive. “Nowadays the black or Asian guys I know in Nottingham would knock you down if you called them darkies. But the underbelly of racism is still there, often directed at Poles and Romanians nowadays. The issue is much the same as it was.”

The underlying theme is perhaps not so much racism as masculinity, teenage males searching for role models in the absence of father figures. In this the film develops from Meadows’s previous work, A Room for Romeo Brass, Once Upon a Time in the Midlands and Dead Man’s Shoes.

In a sense, Meadows says, it is a prequel, an attempt to show the roots from which his work sprang. “The best films with a universal message, like Martin Scorsese’s, don’t set out to make broad statements, they depict a microcosm.” The beating of Milky, which “reflects a night of horrific violence I witnessed as a boy”, stands for “all the people who are beaten or killed every day but who you never read about”.

Films about race or working-class life “sometimes choose a controversial political backdrop in the hope they will appear more serious than they are”, Meadows says. “That annoys me a bit.”

In This is England the politics “seeps in through radio and TV in the background. We filmed it in rundown flats and pubs. I think I’ve been true to that time rather than just using it as a prop.”

His next project is a film for Channel 4 about the Yorkshire Ripper. But he also has plans for a modern version of the Bible story of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, set not in the Midlands, but in Eastern Europe. “Perhaps it’s time I branched out a bit,” he adds.

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