At the end of the gripping, Bafta-winning BBC drama Sherwood, which concluded in 2022 after reaching audiences of 7.5 million, a fragile calm seemed to have settled over its fictional former mining town in north Nottinghamshire. The show was the brainchild of prolific local lad James Graham, writer of the National Theatre hit Dear England, with Joseph Fiennes as Gareth Southgate, and TV drama Quiz, which was inspired by the “coughing major” controversy on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. Real events were the basis for Sherwood, too. In 2004, two murders were committed only streets from where Graham grew up. Keith Frogson, a leading member of the NUM, was killed with a crossbow and sword by another ex-miner, though this was later proved to have no link to the miners’ strike, which had divided the community since the mid-1980s. In an unconnected incident, newlywed Chanel Taylor was shot dead by her father. Both killers went to ground in Sherwood Forest before being apprehended.
Lightly fictionalising this double manhunt narrative, Graham introduced other ingredients, such as warring sisters whose husbands were on opposite sides of the picket line and a plotline involving the “spy cops” scandal. But how to describe the show, other than as Alan Bleasdale meets Line of Duty? “We eventually made peace with it not being defined by any one genre,” says the 42-year-old writer over video call. “Was it a thriller? Was it state-of-the nation? Was it political? Social? A whodunnit? Comedy or serious? Then we started to relax. And it made me realise I could do whatever I wanted with the second series.”
Season two is directed by acclaimed Yorkshire-born film-maker Clio Barnard. It moves the miners’ strike into the background and digs into a different but no less turbulent period. “I knew that for the second series to keep exploring the wounds and the unique challenges of the ‘red wall’, it made sense to go into one of the defining traumas of that area’s modern history,” says Graham. He is referring to the early 2000s, when levels of gun violence in the city led to it being dubbed Shottingham. “I wanted to use that as a springboard to investigate why certain deindustrialised communities suffered a huge amount of rising criminality and drugs, particularly among young men.”
As the new series begins, feelings are running high over proposals for a new mine, prompting a Just Stop Oil-style protest torn from the headlines. The characters are in flux, whether it’s Julie (Lesley Manville), widow of the murdered ex-miner from the first series, who is thinking of selling up, or the criminal Sparrow family contemplating their own futures. Among the fresh faces are a brother and sister, played by David Harewood and Sharlene Whyte, who find themselves fleeing gang violence. Former DCS Ian St Clair (David Morrissey) has left the force and is now heading up a violence intervention team to stem youth crime. He also happens to be single. As Julie drily points out, it probably didn’t help that in his hunt to unmask the community’s former spy cop, he ended up suspecting his own wife.
The final episode revealed the true identity of the former member of the Special Demonstration Squad, who had been planted in the area to gather intelligence on the miners and was still living there undetected decades later. Popping up alongside Graham on video call today is the mole herself, Lorraine Ashbourne. She returns as Daphne Sparrow, the one-time SDS officer now balancing her family’s taxi business with petty crime.
“I’m very proud of the fact that absolutely no one guessed it was Daphne,” says 63-year-old Ashbourne, sitting at home in front of a framed poster for the first Hobbit movie, which starred her husband, Andy Serkis, as Gollum. “I think that’s one of the great achievements of James’s writing.” Graham begs to differ: “You nailed that,” he tells Ashbourne. “How you stayed in the background for most of the scenes demonstrates your lack of ego. You knew the assignment was to be quiet until the end.” An undercover actor, then, as well as an undercover cop.
This time, Daphne is front and centre. “I remember reading the new scripts and nearly dying,” says Ashbourne. It turns out Daphne has been hiding something else, which shall remain under wraps here. “I so didn’t see that coming. What genius! Not only has she lied all her life about being an undercover cop, she’s also got this other secret.”
Daphne meets her match in the form of Ann Branson, played by Monica Dolan, whose previous roles include the serial killer Rose West in Appropriate Adult and the Post Office operator Jo Hamilton, persecuted and prosecuted in this year’s headline-grabbing drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office. As a viewer, Dolan, 55, was glued to the first series of Sherwood. “I made sure to watch it all,” she says. “I wanted to be part of the cultural conversation.” Now she is part of the show itself, and a sinister one at that. Ann, who is out for revenge after the murder of her son, is unmistakably more Rose West than Jo Hamilton. “I’ve known loads of Daphnes,” says Graham. “Basically, she’s all the women I grew up with in my village. But I don’t know a real-life Ann Branson. That would be too scary.”
Indeed, it’s hard to reconcile the thoughtful, smiling Dolan with the menacing figure she plays on screen. Her first appearance, glaring down from the public gallery at a suspect in the dock, reducing him to a gibbering wreck without even saying a word, must rank as the greatest TV entrance of the year so far.
Ann uses chit-chat the way torturers deploy thumb screws. A trivial question about which vegetables go best with a roast, or where to use “less” and “fewer” in a sentence, invariably disguises or prefaces some unspeakable act. “Very little of what she’s up to was clear on the page,” says Dolan. “I’m very nosy and I like figuring that out. Anne is chatty, but it’s difficult to know what’s at the bottom of it. I loved that.” Not everyone did. “There were one or two executives who maybe wanted to make something a bit clearer. And I was like: ‘Please trust me. Can I just try and play this? Or what we’re going to end up with is dialogue where she explains herself. And she just does not give a shit about other people.’” Playing Anne took her back to the experience of making Appropriate Adult. “Look at the length of time that Fred West managed to fool people. What we don’t realise enough, I think, is that there are lots of ways of being clever. We mix that up with being educated.”
Series two ratchets up the suspense – there is a seaside sequence in the second episode involving Daphne and Ann that is almost unbearably tense – but at the core of the show is a community-focused quality that has been there since the start. Would it be wishy-washy to call it healing? “I don’t think it’s wishy-washy at all,” says Graham. “I think it’s the most important thing. In the first series, I imagined scenes that didn’t happen, like when Leslie’s character goes into the miners’ welfare and says: ‘Can we have this out?’ And the characters do have it out. It’s almost a wish fulfilment – you normalise the desire to talk it out and to heal a bit.”
Never let it be said that drama can’t effect change. Dolan experienced very recently that catalytic power with Mr Bates vs the Post Office. Journalists had been pursuing the Post Office Horizon IT scandal for years and suddenly the drama was spilling off the screen and on to the front pages. “It was quite weird seeing it on the news that much,” she says. “I was extremely proud of the audience for being so collectively angry. People were outraged at the injustice. Then because there was going to be an election – maybe I’m being cynical here – the government had to listen.”
As she points out, there’s still a long way to go in the fight for justice. “People lost their homes, their businesses. Alan Bates hasn’t been compensated yet. But yes, it was very heartening. I don’t know any actor of my generation who didn’t start with a fire in their belly, wanting to say something that maybe they don’t have the words for. Wanting to make a difference. I thought: ‘Well, if I get struck by lightning now, I’ve managed to get something that I believe out there, and people have listened.’”
Politicians, too. On that subject, I ask what the Sherwood trio’s hopes are for the new government. “I don’t have any soundbites,” says Ashbourne. “But Keir Starmer is saying all the right things. Let’s hope he succeeds.” Although we are speaking a few days before the far-right begin rioting across the UK, Graham has “the public realm and physical community” much on his mind, and hopes the prime minister does, too.
“Many places have been neglected in terms of the complete underinvestment and the collapse of public entities,” he says. “There are often very few places to actually go. A lot of pubs have closed. Community centres, too. Go to Nottingham city centre and look at the absolute collapse of retail and the high street. Coming down the line is this existential crisis over what is a high street, what is a town centre? It’s not being talked about very much but the desire to be together is still really strong. There needs to be an investment in place, so that people can be together and heal together. And if culture and stories can feed into that, then I’d be very happy.”
Series two of Sherwood is coming soon to BBC One and iPlayer.
