James Graham mines for gold in England’s forgotten corner
There is a television template for dramas involving secrets and lies. You know how it goes: an attention-grabbing premise, a splashy opening episode, then by episode four it’s a hysterical mess but the sunk cost fallacy means you feel compelled to see it through to the bitter end while complaining that it’s rubbish. And almost every scene is set in an expensive kitchen.
Sherwood (BBC One) does not fit this mould (the only thing it has in common with the aforementioned shows is that it features Joanne Froggatt in the cast, but she’s playing against type as an absolute horror).
It is really, really good, a show that is ostensibly a police procedural about murders in a Nottinghamshire village but turns out to be so much more: a layered exploration of community, class and enmity.
Writer James Graham, who brought us ITV’S Quiz, draws us into a neighbourhood where divisions drawn during the 1984 miners’ strike are still rancorous. Nottinghamshire was the seat of the Union of Democratic Mineworkers, whose members continued to work in defiance of Arthur Scargill’s National Union of Mineworkers and ran the gauntlet of flying pickets. In Sherwood’s village of Ashfield, Gary (Alun Armstrong) was one of a handful in solidarity with the
NUM, still spitting the word “scab” at his neighbours all these decades later.
Now there is a murderer on the loose in the village – inspired by two real-life incidents – and there are plenty of suspects. It is the kind of place in which feuds play out with the people next door, sometimes in the same family. Authenticity is an overused word, but Graham grew up in the area and every line of dialogue, every detail of those terraced houses with their tiny backyards, rings true. The BBC agonises over its portrayal of working class communities north of Watford, but here is a show that nails it. A police officer who isn’t local hears that a victim was murdered coming back from “the club” and asks: “There’s a nightclub round here?” As another character puts it: “Come off it, you daft ha’porth.”
The ensemble cast is top notch. Christopher Eccleston claimed last week that opportunities are shrinking for white, straight, middle-aged men. That doesn’t seem to be a problem for James Nesbitt, Eddie Marsan, Martin Freeman, Ewan Mcgregor and the rest, and it’s certainly not the case in Sherwood, which is stuffed to the gills with chewy roles for just this demographic.
Besides Armstrong, there is David Morrissey as the dependable detective chief superintendent Ian St Clair, who has roots in the village but has now moved up the social scale. His sparring partner is Robert Glenister, a Met officer who has history in Ashfield and is reluctantly dragged back there. The supporting cast is uniformly excellent, including Lesley Manville and Claire Rushbrook as estranged sisters. Familiar faces are everywhere: Kevin Doyle (Downton Abbey’s Molesley) as the father of a troubled son, Lindsay Duncan in a minor role. Adeel Akhtar is brilliant as ever, playing a widowed train driver with a monstrous new daughter-in-law.
That daughter-in-law, played by Froggatt, is a Tory councillor. Boo! Hiss! But this is not a crudely political drama; there is only one didactic speech, delivered by Duncan mid-way through the series, drawing a through line from the policing of the miners’ strike to Hillsborough and Stephen Lawrence.
There has long been a rumour in Ashfield that an undercover police officer was planted in the community in the early 1980s as part of a “spycops” operation, and that they remain there to this day. As the series goes on (four episodes were made available to reviewers, so I have watched ahead) the search for the killer becomes secondary to the search for this cuckoo in the nest. Genuinely, I have no idea who it is, which is testament to the quality of the writing. Graham also plays around with the Sherwood Forest clichés. The killer’s weapon of choice is a crossbow. “Is anyone going to mention the obvious cultural reference point here? Bow and arrow, heart of Nottinghamshire – a modernday Robin Hood?” asks a police officer. St Clair swiftly puts paid to that, saying he’s not in the business of fuelling tacky headlines.
It’s possible that the first episode won’t grab you. A large number of characters are introduced in a short space of time, and you’ll find yourself straining to work out who is related to whom, and which side they’re on. But stick with it and you’ll be rewarded. And there is a lesson here for BBC executives, fretting in their London HQ about representation: just commission talented writers to write about the people and places they know. It works.
Sherwood ★★★★★