This Town series is really in tune

I'm not talking about documentaries about bands - they're a supremely easy sell. Do you like the band the doco is about? Then you're sold.

Nor is this about musicians who like to try their hand at acting; though that can be a very hard sell indeed. Just because they appear in a few music videos, some performers seem to think they've nailed this acting caper.

It almost never ends well for them; beyond dealing with fame and adulation, there really isn't a lot of crossover between a music star and a movie star.

So allow me to get to the point. It's fictional bands appearing as the subject of a movie or TV show that is fraught with danger.

As long as you're trying to do it in a dramatic sense. Making a comedy about a fictional band is so much easier, perhaps because so much of the superficiality of being a rock star is funny in reality.

If you go the dramatic route when making a film or TV show about music it's so easy to come off as cringeworthy. That's because much of the life of a rock star already seems faintly ridiculous; if a writer tries to ground their work in that reality it has a tendency to oddly enough appear as unrealistic.

And then there's the music. Even if the band is fictional, the music has to be real. And also not crap - which is a huge stumbling block. How are you meant to believe this character has become a rock star when all their songs sound like garbage?

Perversely, one way around the problems of making a TV show about a band is to create something that doesn't spend much time focusing on the band at all.

That seems to be the approach of Peaky Blinders creator Stephen Knight in his new series This Town. At least if the first episode is anything to go by.

Set in the UK in 1981, almost the sole indication that this might be about a band forming is an interaction between Dante and Jeannie.

Dante is a young man with the seemingly unrealistic goal of being a poet. Jeannie is a far more level-headed person.

She's in a band - which we seen nothing of in the first episode - and she admits that she is great coming up with music but crap at the words.

So it dawns on her that Dante could write the words. That is slipped in at the back half of the first episode and it's as far from the tortured "Hey! We should start a band!" cliche so many music TV shows and films have.

We also meet other characters; Dante's older brother Gregory who is in the British Army, cousin Bardon who has to deal with his dad's desire to pull him into the local IRA units and record store employee Fiona, whom Dante has a big crush on.

While some of them are in different towns, fate conspires to bring them all into one location. Though I have no idea if all of them, some of them or none of them end up in this band that is supposed to be forming in This Town.

Instead, the focus is on the characters. We get to see them as individuals, getting to know them before the series shows us how they fit in.

The acting is of a high standard across the board, but Levi Brown as Dante is unbelievable.

Dante is a character with some real depth; he can be quite naive yet also supremely confident in the face of the city's big gangster.

He's quite bright but also rather hopeless. He's a very odd fish and Brown, in his first leading role, takes all those contradictions and turns them into a thoroughly believable character.