After conquering the world with Peaky Blinders (and before that by co-creating Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?), Steven Knight was last seen on British television giving us his frankly deranged adaptation of Great Expectations. Happily, he’s now returned to form with a show that, while not a retread exactly, is definitely Peaky-adjacent.

In This Town we’re back in a Birmingham – this time in the 1980s – that’s rundown, riven, violent and soul-stifling, yet that Knight presents with unmistakable love. Nor, once again, is there any escaping the overwhelming power of the family as a blessing and a curse. There’s also the same combination of apparent social realism with something much stranger and more mythical – and not just round the edges, but deep within the programme’s soul.

This Town is so full of incident that, after two episodes, summing it up is already impossible

This is most obvious in the dialogue, which is often heightened to a degree that means nobody would speak it in real life, but which perfectly suits – and helps to create – the show’s overall feel. But it also applies to the characters, who, in a more conventional drama, might seem merely implausible. In this one, they manage to pull off the neat trick of being both far-fetched and somehow archetypal.

Leading the way is the teenage Dante (Levi Brown), who wants to be the new Leonard Cohen, but who in his dreaminess, lack of side and fondness for unrequited love bears an unexpected resemblance to that other Midlands teenager, Adrian Mole. Dante was first seen composing poetry in his head as he wandered unwittingly into the Birmingham riots of 1981 where he was beaten by a racist policeman. Running away, he bumped into the more worldly Jeannie (Eve Austin), who failed to interest him in a joint, listened to his unprompted tales of heartbreak and asked: ‘How’s your gorgeous rock-hard brother?’

And with that we cut to Greg (Jordan Bolger), the brother in question: a soldier in an even more riot-torn Belfast. Faced with the rioters, Greg’s main tactics were to notice the beauty of the birdsong and to bellow out the advice that Catholics and Protestants should ‘sing together’. (In the event, they elected to shoot at him instead.)

Completing the trio of male misfits is Bardon (Ben Rose) in Coventry, whose father Eamonn wants him to forget his more artistic dreams and embrace his responsibilities to the family firm – which, unfortunately, is the IRA. Seeing what was going on, Bardon’s nan Marie (Geraldine James) went to confession and begged the local priest to intervene. This the priest did, but only by sending someone else from the IRA to threaten Marie so successfully that she died of a heart attack. At which point, we learned that Marie had been Dante and Greg’s grandmother too.

By this stage – surprisingly early on, given all that had happened – it was apparent that one of This Town’s many strengths would be the serving up of crunching set-pieces. Marie’s funeral allowed for several more, not least the appearance of her drunken daughter – and Eamonn’s estranged wife – Estella (Michelle Dockery). Led to the front by Dante and Bardon, Estella announced, to general consternation, that she’d like to sing a song for her old mum. Susan Boyle-like, she then turned the congregation’s excruciation to misty-eyed wonder as she knocked ‘Over the Rainbow’ out of the park.

This Town is so full of incident – and fully drawn characters, including any number of minor ones – that, after two episodes, summing it up is already impossible. (Do these people never think of the reviewers?) But if there is a through-line, it’s maybe the simultaneous importance and difficulty for the younger people of learning to go their own way and escape what’s expected of them.

Or if you prefer, of learning to sing their own song – a phrase that in This Town oscillates constantly between the metaphorical and the literal. In another terrific individual scene, Bardon drowned out his father’s rendition of a sentimental Irish ballad with a performance of Jimmy Cliff’s ‘You Can Get it if You Really Want’. It’s also quite clear where the drama is heading: the young principals will form a band, combining Dante’s poetry with the Jamaican ska they hear all around them – and that makes for the programme’s thrilling soundtrack.

Of course, it’s exactly the parts of Birmingham and Coventry we see here that gave rise to the British ska revival, which was well under way by 1981 in the real world. (It’s perhaps another sign of the show’s not-quite-realism that it hasn’t yet happened in this universe.) For now, however, our heroes still have many rivers to cross before they so much as play a note together because, like everything else in a programme that’s shaping up to be one of the highlights of the year, the obstacles put in their way by the grown-ups are growing ever more dramatic, urgent and intriguing.