Hey: why is Joe Gilgun not in every show on TV? Logistics, obviously. I know that there are only so many hours in a day, shooting days are long: it’s physically unviable to expect Joe Gilgun to be in every show, on all of TV, all at once. But watch the new season of Brassic (Thursday, 10pm, Sky One) and it is hard not to reel away and wonder: but why is Joe Gilgun not in every show on TV?
A quick recap of Brassic, then, which ahead of its second season this week already possesses the assured energy of a show that knows it has four, maybe five more series in the tank. Gilgun leads as Vinnie, a northern town ne’er-do-well who charms his way through a succession of self-made problems while supported by a diversely ragtag gang. This is peak Gilgun, who always plays remixes of more-or-less the same character in everything he does, but manages it so well it doesn’t matter: brash and tender and funny, with a faultline of emotional weakness running through him, at any one time either threatening to cry about how much his friends mean to him or, alternately, giving the finger to someone out of the window of a stolen lorry while crashing it through a locked gate. This could be him in This Is England, or Misfits, or Preacher, really, but right now it’s him in Brassic, a near-perfect platform for Joe Gilgun to Gilgun on.
That’s not to take away from the rest of the cast, though: the smart foil of Damien Molony’s Dylan, the mothering-as-a-form-of-friendship role of Michelle Keegan’s Erin, Ryan Sampson as a gruff sex-empire proprietor and Dominic West as Vinnie’s posh doctor. At first blush, the supporting cast seems unnecessarily huge, but the more you watch it the more things click together; the more every role in every caper makes sense.
Structurally there are deep parallels between Brassic and the good old days of Shameless: a shambolic central lead who works his way through each episode with all the poise of a box of dropped cymbals; the Ocean’s Eleven-by-way-of-Emmerdale way every plan is carefully plotted, disastrously undertaken and ultimately pulled off; a depiction of working-class life that presents poverty as a hurdle to be cheerfully leapt over once a week instead of the fundamental pulse that beats ominously behind every second of every day; one-shot characters who are far more interesting than most shows’ actual leads (John Thomson plays a salty circus magician for two small scenes that, in any other circumstance, would demand their own spin-off commission).
What I like most about Brassic is that it is an hour long. It doesn’t need to be, and in the wrong hands that would be a problem: a 22-minute episode padded out with flimsy subplots, a pointless cameo, a forced one-episode romance. Instead, Brassic stretches each instalment out elegantly, giving it room to breathe: scenes run longer to accommodate extra funny lines; there are few of those structural, “so what are we doing and where are we going?” pieces that necessarily bolt shorter shows together. Joe Gilgun running around a village getting threatened by villains doesn’t deserve to be as good as this, but it is. Here’s to four or five more seasons.
