After the no-budget festival hits Small Time and the short Where’s The Money, Ronnie? last year, producers were reputedly lining up to produce the next film by the young British director Shane Meadows. Nevertheless Meadows did not turn his back on his roots. TwentyFourSeven is set in a town in the English Midlands that resembles Nottingham, where Meadows grew up. The economic boom of the nineties passed the town by. Young people still hang around the streets of the slums and the sense of community of the fifties, now looked back on with so much nostalgia, is nowhere to be seen. To give young people an aim in these hopeless circumstances, Alan Darcy (Bob Hoskins) wants to revitalise the amateur boxing club from his own youth. He too is down in the dumps at the start of the film. After a disastrous start to the club, the hangers around that Darcy has drummed up seem to find some kind of condition after a trip to Wales.The humour in TwentyFourSeven (the title is slang for ‘day in, day out’) is mainly to be found in the fine characters: apparently incorrigible layabouts with little formal education. The film has a very melancholy undertone in minor scenes such as when Darcy is standing daydreaming in the Welsh mountains or takes his old aunt to a dance hall.
