TV review: A Town Called Malice could have been great - but why do I feel cheated?

Set amongst the beach clubs and palm trees of the Costa del Sol in the early 80s, A Town Called Malice follows the Lords, a crime family of petty thieves from South London, as they decamp from London to Spain to profit from an unexpected windfall – and to escape the attention of the police in a high-profile murder enquiry.

I watched A Town Called Malice (Sky MAX and NOW) right up to the closing credits. I wanted to confirm if the geezer who finished his pint and walked out of the pub at the start was Paul Weller, who wrote and sang the song with The Jam. (It was.) They didn’t credit any cameo, but I noticed that the show had largely been shot in Tenerife.

It’s just another thing wrong with A Town Called Malice. The premise is that a 1980s South London crime family — the Lords — are run out of town and end up on the Costa del Sol. The problem is that most of us have been on the Costa del Sol at some point in our lives and we know that it’s a long strip of beaches hemmed in by the mountains, as against the curvy hills in Tenerife.

So it feels wrong for starters. And the story is wafer-thin. It takes about 30 minutes for Gene (Jack Rowan), the youngest of the Lords, to meet Cindy (Tahirah Sharif), fall in love and propose, get dragged into a pitched battle with a rival gang against Cindy’s wishes, only to get rescued by said Cindy 20 seconds later when she runs over the cop who has arrested Gene. To make a short story shorter, the two of them abscond for the Costa del Sol to lie low with Gene’s uncle Tony.

I couldn’t care less about any of the characters. I know it’s supposed to be a madcap crime caper, but this feels like a cartoon. It doesn’t help that Prince Harry would be a more convincing London gangster than Jack Rowan as Gene. This is highlighted by his parents, the older Lords, played by Jason Statham and Martha Plimpton, who are proper convincing bad uns.

Statham starred in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, so he knows what a proper madcap London gangster show should feel like.

Not like this. Rowan plays Gene as a pretty boy with hidden shallows, so it’s verging on funny to watch him trying to play tough. Sharif has more depth as Cindy, but her transformation from nice girl to serial killer is given 30 seconds of screen time.

A Town Called Malice could have been great. When I told my wife the ‘80s gang on the run on the Costa del Sol’ premise she thought it was a sure-fire winner. Not least because we have our own outlaws who like to winter in the south of Spain.

But this show doesn’t know what it wants to be. It’s rammed full of songs from the 1980s, which feels like a desperate attempt to cover up for the rush job of the script and the plastic characters.

I know this seems overly negative, but I feel cheated out of what could have been a great show. Maybe it will pick up when Gene’s parents arrive out to join him, but I doubt it. This all feels like a waste of a Paul Weller cameo.