"This City is Ours" 9BBC 2025) - Review.

 

‘This City is Ours” (BBC 2025) – Gangsterism and the criminological imagination

By: Andrew Wallace (25/05/25)

Gangsterism along with other transgressive forms looms large in popular culture, documentaries and drama. As to why our morbid curiosities are engaged by edgy and unnerving content is an open question to human nature and a commentary on the dialectical interplay between order and anomic breakdown. Whilst the ‘civilising process’ (Elias) has arguably helped to contain and sanitise violence within modern societies with varying degrees of success, it has also provided paradoxical ‘violent entertainment’ on media platforms. Cultural criminology has drawn attention to how reality and media representations have become problematically enmeshed so that social investigators are no longer able to provide a prima facie ontology of crime.

Gangsterism remains intriguing as it captures the complexity of pre-modern forms of social organisation such as medieval warlords and its eventual accommodation to the secular meritocratic rationalism of contemporary standards. ‘This City is Ours’ (TCIO) is centred on a Liverpudlian crime family and the ensuing power struggle and vicious fall-outs that are precipitated as the son makes a bid to head the ‘firm’. There are copious gangster tropes drawn from the template of ‘The Godfather’ (1972), such as the Catholic hypocrisies of ritual piety versus the reality of murder and criminal mayhem. Criminal firms arguably provide an illuminating commentary on the nature of contemporary capitalism with its atomistic premise of welfare state retrenchment and hyper-individualistic modes of engagement. If collectivist pillars have continued to recede, political discourses continue to recalibrate their focus on canny self-enlightened consumerism and individual responsibilities. Wherein Thatcherism celebrated ‘individuals and families’, the firm of extended family ties and kinship help to ameliorate the creative destruction of the coldly secular cash nexus. Criminal enterprise is also a reflexive response to the permissive possibilities of the unfettered market and invites us to question the cultural limits of economic exchange. The libertarians would argue that much criminality stems from the erroneous attempts to regulate the licentious arenas of consumption such as pornography, prostitution, alcohol and drugs. If Prohibition gave us Al Capone, state regulations throw up the moral quandary of the black market, with Thatcherite injunctions that one cannot buck the universal laws of the market. Interestingly Mrs Thatcher proved inconsistent on this point given her socially conservative prescriptions along with Mrs Whitehouse against the permissive society (Campbell, 1987).

TCIO titillates our decadent curiosity in the criminal ‘other’, entrepreneurialism albeit heterodox in nature. Narcotics continue to be the primary activity for the Phelan-Kavanagh partnership and how they constitute their business through a set of intermediaries and their Columbian overlords. The firm also have their legitimate front-end ‘shells’, innocuous type business premises (laundry) or professional

associates (qualified accountants) who give the outward veneer of respectability. This is undoubtedly abetted by government rhetoric about the need to deregulate and cut red tape and illustrates the alarming symbiosis of formal business practice and the subterranean criminal operations. What lies beneath is often very unsavoury whilst also paradoxically providing us with several hours of compulsive viewing thanks to the charismatic presence of James Nelson Joyce (Michael Kavanagh) and Ronnie Phelan (Sean Bean). Definitely a guilty pleasure of the antihero genre, but somewhat disconcerting that others may watch this not as drama but a semi-documentary bolstering a seductive and transgressive career path for wannabe gangsters.

BBC: This City is Ours (2025). Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0028mhs

(Accessed 25 March 2025)

Campbell, B (1987) The Iron Ladies. London. Virago Press

Elias, N (1939) The Civilizing Process. Basel. Switzerland.

IMDB: The Godfather (1972). Available at: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068646/