Why Sherwood matters

The second series of James Graham’s Nottinghamshire-set BBC drama is event television at its best.

Photo by BBC/House Productions/Sam Taylor

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.

In series two, Ian St Clair (David Morrissey) is no longer a copper, but a local anti-violence tsar. Newly divorced, at home he’s encircled by boxes: a physical symbol of the incoming tide of crime caused by rising gang warfare (how nature abhors a vacuum). Lesley Manville also returns as Julie Jackson, the widow of union organiser Gary, and so does Lorraine Ashbourne as the hard-as-nails matriarch Daphne Sparrow, and they’re both marvellous, agitation forever fluttering behind their characters’ outward composure like a tiny bird trapped and flapping in a cage. Ashbourne’s role in particular, her character both so morally complex and so tightly enclosed by personal ghosts, could hardly be more challenging if it tried – and to watch her pull off every heart-hammering moment is thrilling. Henceforth let every casting director in Britain pay obeisance to her majesty.

But the cast has new members, too. Robert Lindsay appears as Franklin Warner, a local boy turned flamboyant, gallery-endowing millionaire. His family business has designs on the coalfield, but after two episodes we already wonder about his past. Those well-schooled in miners’ strike lore will detect that Warner has a whiff of a certain controversial adviser to Mrs Thatcher in this period; one glance at his luxuriant smoothness, and the air is thick with intrigue and the scent of Floris No 89.

Monica Dolan and Stephen Dillane, meanwhile, play Ann and Roy Branson, a criminal couple of utmost efficiency. Dolan’s performance is quite terrifying: even the most blasé of her small talk is suggestive of violence. The Bransons communicate like silent twins. Graham having given them myriad short lines, half-lines and extended silences, they imbue every one with a repellent telepathy. What goes unsaid is more horrifying by far than words.

As I write, I’m a sugar addict fighting off the urge to eat another caramel. I could (critic’s privilege) watch the rest of the series right now. But I mustn’t, and I won’t. Much better to eke it out; to spend the week desperate to know which pieces of the jigsaw puzzle its writer will next throw down. Watching Sherwood reminds me of the television of my youth: the event of it; the feeling, even at the time, that I would always remember what was being unwrapped before my very eyes. Graham is a prolific and very successful playwright, and I’ve often seen his work on stage. But my deep emotional attachment is to television, which taught me so much about the world at so little cost – and I sense in him fellow feeling on this score. Why else did he write this for the BBC? He wants Sherwood to matter, and I think that it does.