“Oh. Shit the bed! That were wonderful.”
Note: If you haven’t caught up with episodes one, two and three of This is England ’90, there are spoilers ahead.
Of all the main players in Shane Meadows’ This Is England – from the initial feature film to the three TV series that have followed – Joseph Gilgun’s Woody is arguably the character with the strongest arc in the entire show.
Three episodes into the (presumably) closing This Is England ’90, we have a very different Woody from the 2007 film; he seems to have settled down from his troubles with Lol and brief separation from Milky and the rest of the gang, but you can still sense the restless energy beneath all the domestic bliss, joints and arm wrestling.
It’s called the male condition, that conflict between the single vs. the married life, and there’s no better character on television to subtly show that battle within.
In three words, he’s: Charming, charismatic, temperamental.
Why he’s a TV great: If you could share a pint with any TV character from the last decade, Woody would be right up there. From his first moments on screen with a distraught Shaun, you can see his protective side and how under those rough edges beats a heart of gold.
“Oh, mate, you’re breakin’ me heart. Come and sit down for five minutes.”
You love the manchild straight away, and can see why the likes of Milky, Gadget and Lol are so drawn to him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wS5g3xLCrGo
The strength of the character is also in his weakness.
Woody gets torn between, at various times, Lol, Combo, his parents and that jobsworth of a boss. Never quite knowing the best way to get ahead, he ends up trying to please everybody but himself and fails miserably at the whole lot.
Gilgun himself has said that Woody is “a bit of a wimp” and he has retreated in the past when trouble has come to the door, but now with Combo moving in to the house with him and Lol we’re going to see his resolve – and his friendship with Milky – tested like never before in the show’s feature-length climax this Sunday.
It’s not going to be easy, given all that history.
For all that sense of impending doom, however, you can’t have a Shane Meadows production without both the light and the dark. Woody is hilarious when he’s on form, much of that is down to Gilgun’s powers of improvisation.
If we could put him in any other show: He’d have fit right in on the couch with Jim Royle and The Royle Family, back before it became a series of Christmas parodies.
You could just picture him there, picking his nose while Barbara feeds him cups of tea and Club Milks, happy to be away from all the drama that a stint on This is England brings.
He’d make a lovely boyfriend for Cheryl, too.
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