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.
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