From Middlemarch to Peyton Place, the small town has always made for the richest – and in the case of the latter, the wildest – reading; and Peyton Place, of course, eventually became a TV soap. Again, then, I return to Sherwood’s setting. The greatness of James Graham’s drama has many causes: the plotting is dextrous, the acting superlative, the dialogue confidently spartan; if its interstices are highly political, this is never laboured. In the end, though, it’s Sherwood’s geography – its psychogeography – that I love most of all. Here, London might as well not exist. Even Nottingham seems exotically distant. When some of its characters go to Skegness, as they do in the new series, a moonscape seems to unfold around them. This, in more ways than one, is the edge of the world.
If you didn’t see the first series, I command you to do so before you embark on the second. But to recap, Sherwood is set in a village in the Nottinghamshire coalfield where Graham, its writer, grew up (in case you’re wondering, it takes just over two hours to drive from Kirkby in Ashfield, where he went to school, to Skeggy). The time is now, but, like dandelions poking between paving stones, the past keeps pushing up against the present. The village has scars which may be traced back to the miners’ strike of 1984. In Nottinghamshire, as in nearby Derbyshire, many men continued to work; families were divided, long-standing friendships broken. The first series began with the murder of a former union activist, and climaxed with the revelation that a so-called spy cop (a covert police spy) was still living somewhere in the community.
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