Outlaws of St. Giles

Musician Fionn lives in early 1980s Camden Town with his bandmates. 

He doesn’t remember it, but he first met them 140 years earlier, in a rough London neighbourhood. They haven’t aged since then.

Searching for the truth, Fionn relives memories of the 1840s, but finds an enemy waiting, eternally avowed to kill them all.

Peaky Blinders (underbelly, soap) 

Ripper St (period issues, uncontrollable beast of Whitechapel) 

Kneecap (rebellion, communitas) 

Silo (population density)

Sympathy 

Fionn is struggling because of his head injury. 

There are several basic things that he needs to do, but can’t.

In typical fashion, he’s good-natured about it, but his frustration is visible.

Jeopardy

Initially it looks touch and go whether Fionn will survive as he almost dies while in a coma.

Later he is/feels hunted by Harry the Plague when he’s in his dream of old St.. Giles.

Fionn is Likable

He smiles at Ayah through bandages that he has unravelled from his head and wrapped around his face and ominously outstretched hands like the Mummy in the film Dawn of the Mummy (1981)

Fionn is Highly-Skilled

He can play or sing anything he hears in an instant.

Like all of his 170-year-old friends, Fionn has tens, if not hundreds of thousands of hours of practicing skills of varying degrees of usefulness, few of which he remembers, so they tend to come as a surprise. 

Fionn is empowered (in-touch with his own Power).

He strives to achieve a very high standard in what he plays or creates and sees that he can do the things required to realise that standard.

Fionn Quirks and Flaws

These, like Fionn’s skills have had many decades to root and grow.

Irrepressible Ayah was a nanny for a rich family that brought her to London from her home in Southern India. 

But after a few months they replaced her with an English nanny and threw her out.

Industrious and wise, she uses her knowledge of medicine and of people to prepare and sell nostrums on the streets of St Giles.

In 1982 Ayah continues to make and sell herbal remedies from her stall at Camden Market.

She doesn’t remember it, but she married Steven in 1843, now in 1982 he’s coming home.

Born rough and hungry into an attic room in a house at the top of nearby Drury Lane, Harry was in his fifties when the Great Plague of 1665 started in the house next door. 

He’s said to have struck a demonic bargain for his life outside the gates of the old church that very night and is now in a sense, Plague to all and any of Fionn’s kind.

Harry values old–fashioned hard graft, menace and extortion which dovetails nicely with supplying the Angel and other local pubs with his beer, having for many years, lived off replenishing the hostelries of St. Giles with poor-quality gin.

Outlaws of St Giles is a supernatural drama serial about navigating choices and decisions, it uses two different eras as a framework in order to juxtapose main character’s choices and outcomes within each episode.

After Fionn, the protagonist and implied viewer emerges from his coma, the screenplay moves between the (now connected) twin narrative threads set in London in different eras: One nostalgic, the other a liminal world of possibility and horror.

Key to the action is that for the most part, characters don’t remember their 160 year-odd pasts, so the viewer gets to predict whether they repeat or avoid previous mistakes.

The core characters’ formative stories and reasons for being or becoming an archetypal outlaw are revealed in the 1840s timeframe, but play out in the 1980s.

The authentic, day-to-day playing in the band, printing tshirts, making things to sell at the market and general hanging out In Camden Town offers a feast London Cool alternative to pseudo nostalgia and American retro.

St Giles is an anarchic old world that sits just in sight at the edge of familiar history and the dawn of modern London. 

The world of St. Giles leans heavily on the folk horror genre, despite its urban setting, as the Industrial Revolution saw the mass exodus of people from the countryside to the town, bringing their ways and traditions with them.