Sherwood, BBC 1, Monday and Tuesday
It’s competing in the deepest pool in entertainment, but Sherwood is comfortably near the top.
The amount of drama being produced by terrestrial television stations and global streamers is mesmerising and difficult to keep track of.
Crime drama is by far the most popular genre of these, but don’t let the glut put you off watching Sherwood.
Unlike many shows, it is only released to the iPlayer after the television screening, meaning Monday and Tuesday evenings might be busy for a few weeks.
It’s based on real life events in a northern pit village where the scars of the miners’ strike remain decades after the rancour and confrontation.
To make sure you don’t miss the reference, it opens with Arthur Scargill bellowing about how the stain of being a ‘scab’ will remain with strike breakers for the rest of their lives.
Scab was the pejorative term used about miners who decided that they wanted to remain at work and not join the picket lines.
They were difficult times when the free market beliefs of Margaret Thatcher crashed into the unions and communities who relied on coal mines for their living and sense of belonging.
In 2004, twenty years after miners’ strike began, the deep schism resurfaced in Nottinghamshire with two murders.
Sherwood writer James Graham grew up nearby.
Gary Jackson, an official in Scargill’s hard-line National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), was shot in the chest with a crossbow as he walked home from the local working men’s club.
He’d just had a row in the bar after calling a member of the more moderate Union of Democratic Mineworkers (UDM) a “scab.”
The divisions are all around. Gary’s widow Julie barely speaks to her sister and next-door neighbour, Cathy, because of the actions of her husband.
And there are many suspects for the murder. The son of the local crime family (the Sparrows) had a minor confrontation with Gary in the street when he turns up in his taxi with a hammer on the passenger seat.
Meanwhile, there’s Cathy’s son Scott who is awaiting sentencing for an expected prison sentence and is an archery fan.
Then there’s the sinister involvement of the Metropolitan police, hated at the time by the miners for their heavy-handed approach to the pickets.
When investigating local officer Ian St Clair searches for clues to the motive for the killing in Gary’s background, he finds that details about his 1984 arrest are redacted and when he rings up the Met detective to ask why, he gets only obfuscation.
It deep and knotty stuff. What feels like dozens of characters are introduced in the opening episodes as the viewer tries to piece together the connections, the loyalties and the hatreds.
And like good drama should, the story in not simply historical but has current references.
Village native Sarah Fisher wants to be a Conservative councillor for the area and is canvassing houses for the upcoming election. A future Red Wall Tory MP perhaps.
And it’s further reflective of our present day situation.
History never repeats itself but it often rhymes, said Twain and we find ourselves at a rhyming point to the oil crisis and inflation of the 1970s which created the environment and background to the miners’ strike.
There is a danger that the current soaring cost of living, the enormous increase in the price of energy and other commodities and the subsequent damage caused to the economy could lead us to similar societal tensions and other dangerous confrontations.
Sherwood fizzes with superb writing and quality acting and is worthy of your attention.
