I didn’t expect much to like This City is Ours: on paper, it sounded like just another colour-by-numbers Sunday night BBC drama. But two episodes in, and I’ve got the heated rollers on. Oh, the accents, the clothes, the caterpillar eyebrows! Put aside the gruesome killings – every so often, someone will be casually bumped off, as if they were just a rogue hair poking out of a perma-tanned shin – and what we’re left with is a highly superior Scouse Dallas, its unfeeling, brutish men strolling along with their legs unfeasibly wide apart; its ruthlessly ambitious women all trussed up in too-tight palazzo pants like chickens at Birkenhead market.
Ronnie Phelan (Sean Bean) is the ageing boss of a criminal gang whose chief source of income comes from drugs. Ronnie, who favours suits the colour of chicken liver pâté, is already rich, but he would like to “improve margins”, the better to spend more time on the golf course, or in his ugly Spanish villa (big, square and white, its architect may have been inspired by the enamel veneers that are so popular in Liverpool these days). When this is done, he intends to pass on his “clogs” to his long-standing right-hand man, Michael (James Nelson-Joyce), whose business brain is shrewd and whose loyalty is a given.
But alas, there’s a spanner in the works in the form of Ronnie’s hopeless, braggart son, Jamie (Jack McMullen), who fancies the business himself, and whose wife Melissa is demanding an apartment in Dubai, pronto. Jamie has few advantages in the race to the top; at “business” meetings, he’s a cocksure calamity. But this is a Scouse, Catholic family. Blood is thicker than water. Mawkishness and mercilessness are ever in close proximity. Jamie’s doting but all-seeing mother, Elaine (Julie Graham) – think pure complicity in a La Perla satin robe – may soon get out her talons on his behalf.
Stephen Butchard (The Last Kingdom, Shardlake) has written something really rather marvellous and witty here, though I rail against the early killing off of a principal character – a move that draws too much oxygen from the series (such “surprises” are becoming habitual in TV). In the second episode, there is an extended scene that comes straight from the theatre, a man “ended” – the gangsters’ euphemism for murdered – while everyone is lounging about by Ronnie’s pool, and it’s priceless, a perfect combination of menace and farce. The molls are at first embarrassed when the dead man’s phone rings, but pretty soon, they’re all drinking frozen margaritas and discussing where they’ll have dinner.
The details are just right, something that helps to make Butchard’s script convincing, even when it’s outlandish. The christening of Ronnie’s first grandchild, funded by the considerable wages of sin, is a big, showy affair: a priest who talks of rejecting Satan, a singer (at the reception) who knows how to belt out “Mack the Knife”. Michael and his girlfriend Diana (Hannah Onslow) are going through IVF, and his sentimentality in the matter of their embryos runs alongside his handiness with both knife and gun (in this world, men who cry easily are always the meanest).
Diana is an interesting character. Her mother is in prison, but she runs a smart restaurant and has things to say about Albariño. “I’m not your bird or your Miss World,” she tells Michael at the christening, her green trouser suit startlingly out of place among all the pink and the feathers (no, she won’t be line dancing). But who can be prim, let alone classy, in this context? For how long will she able to compartmentalise?
The performances are great. I love Graham, and I’m glad she’s in this, as hard-wearing as a good Gucci handbag. Nelson-Joyce is a perfect weasel, the eyes forever sliding from left to right.
As for Bean, though we know he doesn’t have too many settings as an actor, he seems only to get better. As Ronnie, he’s both terrifying and bumbling: unable to birdie on the golf course, unable to shoot a double dealer without falling into tetchiness. (“I’m not standing here getting lectured as well as f***ing sunburnt,” he shouts at Michael, who’s asking too many post-execution questions.) He is a simple man, and a brutal one, his desires played out to the gentle sound of Perry Como and Matt Monro.
This City is Ours
BBC One
[See also: Munch the social animal]
Content from our partners
