I still regard the ‘90s as too close to exert any nostalgic clout, although that odd feeling of proximity is said to be a sign of age: if you think the ‘90s were just a few years ago then you’re getting old.

And yet the 1980s, when I was born, feels like an aeon ago: it was a time when I had luminous yellow roller skates, crimped hair which would lie warm on my forehead, and a dad who, lacking sons, kept trying to teach me to love football. Oh, how I lived in dread of the day when he’d announce he was finally taking me to Ibrox. I can remember protesting, “But Daddy! Men will hit me with glass bottles!” It was the ‘80s, you see.

So that was the ‘80s: being wee and frightened and made to play football, but the ‘90s? Well, that was just a few years ago, was it not? But I look at the date, do some counting on my fingers, and find 1990 was actually 25 years ago and I am astonished. I’m also dismayed to find how little I’ve changed: I still dislike football and men with glass bottles and I still love the Pet Shop Boys.

I was wary, then, of how effective the new chapter of This Is England (C4) would be as the story has now moved forward to the ‘90s. The clout of the original film, and the subsequent TV series, came from its fierce evocation of the 1980s, but I’ve always regarded the following decade as simply ‘80s-lite. Would there be enough stuff – enough distinctive music, fashion and texture – to evoke the period?

The answer is yes, and if I hadn’t spent the ‘90s listening solely to the Pet Shop Boys I might have known that. When Lol and the gang started revelling in the tunes of the new Madchester scene I shared their wonder, although for different reasons. They might have been thinking “Hey, what are this new group called?” but I was asking “Hey, what were that old band called?” It was new to us both, but we were all loving the songs and it made me realise there was indeed a distinctive sound to that decade, I just hadn’t realised it at the time, and so I began to look back fondly at that era and then – BANG! We have 90s nostalgia and This Is England began to exert the same pull as before.

And fondness is the right word for this resumption of the story because this first episode was a gentle, low-key one. The original film, and subsequent series, have given us some awful, harrowing moments, the most memorable of which was surely Lol killing her father with a hammer when he tried to rape her. There were no such horrors in this opening episode and the only example of violence was a punch-up between the gang and a bunch of skinny, pretentious Goths although it was more like a playground fight than anything meant to disturb.

We’re re-introduced to the gang at the grubby back door of a school. Lol is now a dinner lady and is sending leftovers out to her friends who lounge around at the bins, smoking and complaining about the quality of the scraps but this is not – yet – an England of food banks. They aren’t doing this from  necessity but, instead, out of boredom and a grab at nostalgia. Gadget is disgruntled that there are no chips and is unmoved by Lol’s offer of new potatoes instead. What kind of comfort food is a new potato, he asks? He wants “meals we ate when we were happy. When we were kids”, and no self-respecting working-class youngster had “new potatoes” in the good old days.

So the opening scene is about a sad longing for lost youth and innocence and Lol is the brutal bite of realism, shouting that there are no chips!

Elsewhere, Shaun is still pining for Smell, and lounges around the house in a hopeless daze whilst his mum nags him to go back to college to try and meet “a young lady”. His performance here is wonderful, as he simmers and scowls, brilliantly on the cusp between teenage sulkiness and real resentment. He tries to lose himself in some drugs and then just as valiantly tries to conquer the nausea which soon overwhelms him. Of course, all his turmoil must have its way and it finally explodes at a disco when Smell’s new boyfriend approaches him.

 This episode was mild and humorous but already there is the warming sensation of being back amidst familiar, authentic characters.