Community, Seriality, and the State of the Nation - British and Irish Television Series in the 21st Century

This Is England , too, emphasises the fragility, if not illusion of community as a haven of security by focusing on how the group of skinheads disintegrates. The original film traces the historical split of skinhead culture, rather unpolitical at the onset, into the far left and the far right when the nationalist sympathies of ex-convict Combo (Stephen Graham) turn into outright racist aggression, and he brutally beats up Milky to within an inch of his life. The title of the film and the series is borrowed from Combo’s impassioned diatribe against immigration, in which he evokes the xenophobic clichés and anxieties exploited by the National Front: his assertive claim of “this is England” refers to a proud history of Empire blighted by immigration. When Combo thus adopts nationalist stereotypes, this represents not just “the hijacking of an optimistic, celebratory working-class culture – one that revels in Jamaican music and influences – by an angry, bitter reactionary movement that wants to blame ethnic minorities and immigrants for their problems” (Butler); Combo’s embracing of nationalism and xenophobia poignantly highlights more generally how “the ostensibly shared ‘communal’ identities are after-effects or by-products of forever unfinished (and all the more feverish and ferocious for that reason) boundary drawing”, as Bauman (17) argues building on the ideas of Norwegian anthropologist Frederick Barth.

Most, if not all contemporary television series tend to approach community through what it is lacking. As Zygmunt Bauman points out, “[w]hat that word evokes is everything we miss and we lack to be secure, confident and trusting” (3). Community certainly comes in different shapes in these series, be it “a particular form of social organization based on small groups, such as neighbourhoods, the small town, or a spatially bounded locality” (Delanty 2), or a culturally or politically defined group. As Gerard Delanty explains,

a closer look reveals that the term community does in fact designate both an idea about belonging and a particular social phenomenon, such as expressions of longing for community, the search for meaning and solidarity, and collective identities. (3, emphasis in original)

In practically all cases, however, community appears fragile at best, which corresponds to the sociological observation that the “loss of community and family solidarity is precisely the substance of the changes theorized by many contemporary social theorists” (Charles 452). Even those series set in places that represent the ideal type of community in being distinctive, small, and self-sufficient (see Bauman 12), such as The Street (2006-2009), The Village (2013), Broadchurch (2013-2017), or Shetland (2013-), reveal cracks in their social fabric that identify community in the sense of “a source of security and belonging” (Delanty 1) as a nearly unattainable ideal.

While many series thus have a pronounced local focus – one could substantiate the list above with Top Boy (2011-), Peaky Blinders (2013-), and Happy Valley (2014-), which are set in London’s East End, in Birmingham, and in West Yorkshire’s Calder Valley respectively –, many recent productions transcend locality in a move in which “the local is made metonymic of the national” (Piper 180). Individual, local phenomena become emblematic of the state of the nation or ‘Condition of England’ as a whole. The working-class skinhead culture of This Is England in particular harks back to the Victorian genre of the ‘Condition of England’ novel with its roots in the 19 thcentury critique of industrialisation, since “the boots, collared shirt and suspenders the skinheads chose to wear were all deliberate imitations of the kinds of clothing items worn by members of the English working class in previous decades” (Bergin 244). Originating in the ‘factory novel’ or ‘industrial novel’ of the 1830s, this type of fiction was designed to make the population aware of the atrocious conditions to which the workers, women and children among them, were exposed in the factories: hunger, disease, poverty, abuse, and the strain of unconscionably long working hours. At the time, this so-called ‘factory question’ was held to be largely synonymous with the ‘Condition of England’ question. Frances Trollope’s The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy (1840), for instance, managed to bring “the plight of the factory worker to mainstream Victorian audiences” (see Simmons 341). Today, however, the genre of the Victorian Condition of England novel (or alternatively, industrial novel, social novel, or social problem novel) is mainly associated with aesthetically more advanced examples like Benjamin Disraeli’s Sibyl; or, the Two Nations (1845), Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley: A Tale (1849), Charles Dickens’ Hard Times (1854), or Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (1848) and North and South (1855).

The problems of Victorian Britain may seem a far cry from the state of the nation today; the gap between rich and poor, however, which Victorian historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle considered the hallmark of his age has hardly diminished. In Past and Present (1843), Carlyle, who coined the term ‘Condition of England’,1 harshly condemns the underprivileged position of the working class, which he sees barred from the country’s riches. The hardship in Victorian society reached such an extent that Benjamin Disraeli famously described England in his novel Sybil as split into “two nations”, divided into a rich upper class and a destitute working class:

Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws. (33)

The divisions Disraeli depicts reach far beyond mere matters of money into the spheres of mentalities, everyday culture, and education, and they are by no means a thing of the past: in his observations on Rewriting the Nation (2011) in contemporary British drama, Alex Sierz included a chapter on the “Two Nations”, diagnosing a similar split between rich and poor, between different ethnicities, and different communities.

Indeed, contemporary approaches to the Condition of England strikingly resemble those voiced in the essays of Thomas Carlyle. In “Signs of the Times” (1829), Carlyle sees his era defined by an all-embracing process of mechanisation. Not only has machinery substituted the human workforce; apart from physical instruments, Carlyle also detects the dehumanising spirit of machinery in the bureaucratic spirit of regulation, institutionalisation, and economisation. In his vision of the “Age of Machinery”, political, spiritual, and social values have fallen apart: “The King has virtually abdicated; the Church is a widow, without jointure; public principle is gone; private honesty is going; society, in short, is fast falling in pieces; and a time of unmixed evil is come on us.” (“Signs”, 33) It is certainly tempting to compare Carlyle’s view of his time to contemporary indictments of Thatcherism and the politics of austerity. As director Ken Loach maintains, “[t]he consequences of Thatcher and Blair have eroded the sense that we are responsible for each other, that we are our brothers’ and sisters’ keeper” (qtd. in Hattenstone). Contemporary screen writers have found many ways of juxtaposing individual responsibility with the corrupted, corrupting, and sometimes even dehumanising power of institutions. Perhaps most strikingly, Ken Loach’s film I, Daniel Blake (2016) attacks the devastating failure of social institutions, and the jobcentre in particular, to take account of and remedy individual ill fortunes. In a similar manner, Broken (2017) reveals the hypocrisy of the church, Silk (2011-2014) pinpoints the absurdities of the legal system, and Line of Duty (2012-) explores corruption up to the highest levels of the police service. As productions like these go to prove, the extensive framework of serial narration – a device which itself originated in the Victorian vogue for serialised fiction – offers an especially suited medium for depicting the state of the nation today in much detail and from different angles.

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