It’s immaculately acted, brutally convincing and full of James Graham’s love, care and talent. We need this state-of-the nation drama now more than ever
The coal’s the thing. The first series of Sherwood by James Graham was based on his experiences growing up in a Nottinghamshire pit village. There, the people and culture were shaped first by the shared experience of mining, and then in the 1980s by striking against – or not – the closure of the pits and the end of an industry. The original series was a state-of-the-nation piece played out through two murder mysteries. This return to the village is derived from the period about 10 years later when – as archive news footage and headlines that open the new six-parter remind us – gang-related violence reached such a pitch that the city was nicknamed “Shottingham”.
The divisions of old are still there in Sherwood’s second outing, but the more pressing issue is how you deal with a disaffected generation who lack their parents’ and grandparents’ sense of purpose and about communities that have nothing to cohere around any more. This time, the question plays out through the murder of a young man that brings Ian St Clair (David Morrissey) out of “retirement” – he has left the police to take up a crime-prevention role as a local anti-violence tsar – and matriarch of the feared Sparrow clan Daphne (Lorraine Ashbourne, coming into her kingdom after spending most of the original series in the background) back into the world of extremely criminal activity indeed. Her younger son Ronan (Bill Jones) is a witness to the murder. The dead man’s parents are Anne and Roy Branson (Monica Dolan, superbly grief-stricken and terrifying, and Stephen Dillane, prowling behind her), the heads of a rival crime family who are now, insistently, out for revenge.
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