Mrs H and I are overly infuenced by reviews these days when it comes to what we watch on TV. Life is too short to watch even half of the first episode of a new series before having the debate about whether it's worth persevering with. It always feels as if we've failed to give it a chance if we bail out so early but the alternative is sticking with it all the way through only to conclude that's several hours of life we wasted and won't get back.
Based on positive reviews we gave the BBC series This City Is Ours a go. It's based around a drug dealing family in Liverpool, which sounded fairly grim and unpromising. But we gave it a go and can recommend it.
The lead character is played by James Nelson-Joyce who, despite his seemingly posh double barrelled name, hails from Orrell Park 3 stops on Merseyrail towards the city centre from the suburb where I was brought up. Most of the scouse accents are convincing, but his is real. He's the mean looking dude in the centre below:
Nelson-Joyce plays Michael Kavanagh, correctly pronounced in the northern way, to rhyme with Savannah with the gh having essentially no impact, rather the the southern way as in a colleague I worked with in Oxfordshire whose surname Cavanagh was pronounced Ca-vn-are.
Kavanagh is not part of the family but is the patriarch's trusted and long serving number 2 introducing inevitable tension with the oldest son, who is somewhat younger than Kavanagh but has also come to believe he should take over the business now its founder has started thinking of retirement. And also, as a result, got greedy for larger returns, setting it up for things to go wrong.
Which made me ponder - how many drug dealers get to retire peacefully anyway? Spoiler alert - the patriarch, played by Sean Bean (who makes no attempt at a scouse accent) doesn't get to retire in good health.
We liked the many authentic scouse touches, such as the son referring to Kavanagh as "soft lad", which doesn't mean he's a softie, it's a form of mild scouse abuse meaning soft in the head, i.e. a bit dim. Soft lad can also be used as a term of teasing endearment. An example is when Mrs H, finding she needed to buy a new golf glove before playing and with no means of paying, told the our club pro shop to "put it on soft lad's account" (i.e. mine). Which produced a slightly surprised "what did you call him?" response. "Soft lad". "Oh, right then".
It turns out that Kavanagh is a bit of a softie in some ways, as well as a hard case. But I won't say more in case you decide to watch.
The series is well made, with some good choices of music and some stunning views of Liverpool as well as the inevitable grittiness. I could readily nitpick - as an example would the Colombian cartel's Spanish contact man really walk around the streets of Liverpool without a minder? But we'll definitely watch the second series which has already been commissioned.
I told Mrs H that that I'd read several years ago that Liverpool was the only English city in which the drugs trade hadn't been taken over by foreign gangs. Indeed, according to the Guardian 5 years ago, Liverpool gangs dominate the trade in guns and drugs everywhere in the UK outside London. The lead dude at the National Crime Agency's Firearms Threat Centre was quoted as saying "the evidence is that the north-west groups pretty much dominate the rest of the [criminal] communities in the UK".
Amongst their 'achievements' are gun factories which use cheap components sourced from China to convert £135 handguns from Slovakia and the Czech Republic into automatic firearms they can sell on for £5,000. They import cocaine from South American cartels via the city's container port and feed the "county lines". Links have been made with organised crime gangs in Ireland and they have good connections into Scotland.
"In Liverpool and the north-west there is a combination of really good business entrepreneurs that have evolved...learnt new mechanisms, means of communication, transport and concealment" the NCA source said. This criminal skill set should be considered alongside the city's demographics: before the pandemic a third of the city's children lived below the poverty line. "You look at the consistent demographic of unemployment and deprived areas and how serious organised crime has evolved. If you did an assessment of how society has evolved with serious organised crime, Liverpool's gangs have probably been at the forefront.... It's about sculpting your business model".
In a way that isn't at all right, proper or approriate it makes a son of Merseyside feel rather proud in a strange kind of way.
Liverpool gangs dominate guns and drugs trade outside London. The Guardian 11 July 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/11/liverpool-gangs-dominate-gun-and-drugs-trade-outside-london
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Nelson-Joyce
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