Decades on from the miners’ strikes of the 1980s, the word “scab” has lost none of its charge in the Nottinghamshire village where James Graham’s latest TV series is set. Each time that it is deployed by Gary Jackson (Alun Armstrong), a former miner who stopped working while many of his colleagues crossed the picket line, it is as if the years drain away and barely concealed resentment and anger rushes to the surface.
Gary lobs the phrase at his neighbours like a grenade; the conflict has ripped through his family, with his wife Julie (Lesley Manville) still barely speaking to her sister Cathy (Claire Rushbrook) because her husband (Kevin Doyle) was among the miners who carried on working. When Gary is walking back from the local miners’ club after a few pints (having narrowly avoided a violent run-in after using his go-to insult on a fellow drinker), he is suddenly struck down by an arrow which flies straight into his heart.
The murder draws police chief Ian St Clair (David Morrissey) back to his home town, churning up memories of his stint policing the picket lines, when he was simultaneously seen as a traitor by some locals and shocked at the violent contempt with which the strikers were treated by the Met Police officers summoned to the scene.
Gary’s death, he believes, might be linked to the events of a night in 1984, when he was arrested then released for reasons which have remained frustratingly opaque ever since; the Met officer who let him free, played by Robert Glenister, is dispatched to the village in an attempt to illuminate the case.
Arrows continue to fly - St Clair chides his colleagues for referring to the culprit as the ‘Robin Hood killer’ - but Sherwood is far richer and more intriguing than your usual police procedural. Graham makes the unusual decision to reveal the murderer’s identity early on; this might have caused a lesser writer to flounder, but here, the murder plot is just one of many narrative layers.
The fact that we know who the killer is does very little to dissipate the tension that seeps out of every exchange between family members, colleagues and neighbours. From the show’s opening moments, the village feels like a pressure cooker of grudges on a micro and macro scale, which have festered and calcified over the years (“What else is there to do round here but remember?”, one character points out in a later episode). It is based on the place where Graham grew up (the series is also loosely inspired by a pair of killings in the area in the early Noughties) and the sense of place is palpable throughout.
Graham builds believable characters and dynamics with devastating economy and empathy: Adeel Akhtar is especially heartbreaking as the softly-spoken train driver Andy, left feeling like a spare part after his son Neel (Bally Gill) marries aspiring Tory councillor Sarah (Joanne Froggatt), who is ruthlessly upwardly mobile. There’s not a weak link in this ensemble, and even the briefer supporting roles somehow feel lived in, a wonderful synthesis of writing and performance: as a National Union of Mineworkers representative who appears in a later episode, Lindsay Duncan gets to deliver the sort of speech that rattles round in your head for days after watching.
Perhaps best of all, though, is Manville as Julie, constantly oscillating between humour and heartache, warmth and prickly anger, radiating hundreds of different emotions at once. Even when she is padding around in her slippers and trackies, she’s truly formidable. It’s a performance that quietly, cleverly demands your attention, within a show that does the same.
