Sherwood

Sherwood opens with a man shot dead by a crossbow on his way home from the pub, and for about twenty minutes it looks like a police procedural with an unusual weapon. It is not. James Graham, who wrote it, has used the murder as a way into a village in the Nottinghamshire coalfield where the strike of 1984 never quite ended, and where the words scab and picket are still said across garden fences by people in their sixties. The dead man was on strike. His brother-in-law was not. That is the whole of the drama, and Graham takes six episodes to draw it out.

It is very good, and we would recommend it to almost anyone who can sit through a first hour that does more introducing than storytelling. The Nottinghamshire miners are remembered, where they are remembered at all, as the ones who kept working, and Graham’s real subject is what that has meant for the people who stayed: two sisters, Julie Jackson (Lesley Manville) and Cathy Rowley (Claire Rushbrook), living a few doors apart and not speaking, because one husband crossed a line the other held. The police are the excuse. The families are the point.

Manville is the best thing in it. Julie is widowed in the first episode, and Manville plays grief as a kind of bad temper, a woman who wants the police out of her kitchen and her sister off her step and cannot say why she is angrier at the living than at whoever did it. Rushbrook is her match, quieter and more frightened. Kevin Doyle gives Fred Rowley, the man who worked through the strike, a heavy, patient decency that makes the insults thrown at him land on us too. Adeel Akhtar’s Andy Fisher, a train driver with a son about to marry above him, is doing something in the corners of the early episodes that we will not describe, and it is the most unnerving acting in the series.

The moment that stayed with us was small. A man shouts scab at another man across an ordinary street, in daylight, in the present day, and means it. We laughed, once, because it sounded like something from an old newsreel, and then stopped, because nobody on screen thought it was funny. Graham’s point is that the strike is not history to these people. It is a thing that happened to them on a Tuesday, and it is still Tuesday.

The police strand is thinner. David Morrissey’s St Clair is a local boy who got out and came back, and Robert Glenister’s Salisbury is a Metropolitan officer who was here in 1984, when the Met was bussed into the coalfields and behaved as the villages still remember. The friction between them is well played, and Glenister in particular does a fine job of a man who knows exactly why nobody will shake his hand. But their investigation moves in the way television investigations move, by discovery and confrontation, and it sits awkwardly beside the domestic scenes, which move the way life does.

Clio Bernard, Lewis Arnold and Ben A. Williams direct, and Sam Care photographs the village as a place of low sky, brick terraces and one large wood at the edge of everything. The wood is where the series keeps returning, and Care shoots it in flat green daylight rather than horror-film dusk, which is the right choice: the threat here is not the dark. The pacing is another matter. The Radio Times complaint that the early episodes lack urgency is fair. Graham has a large cast and wants us to know all of them before anything else happens, and the first episode in particular is heavy going.

The last episode tells rather than shows. Graham is a playwright, and when he has something to say about policing, betrayal and the state, he tends to give it to a character to say out loud, at length, in a room. Two or three such speeches arrive at the end, and each one is good and each one stops the drama to be delivered. The real events the story draws on are handled with care, but the ending ties off more than it needs to. A second series followed in 2024, with a new story in the same place, which suggests Graham knew he had not finished either.

Watch it two episodes at a time, and give the first one the benefit of the doubt.