The Gallows Pole is, as the BBC publicity machine tells us, the “remarkable true story of the rise of David Hartley and the Cragg Vale Coiners”. Keen student of economic history though I am, I wasn’t previously familiar with this 18th-century legend, and it seems eminently well-suited to a television adaptation. Set in the atmospheric moorlands of Yorkshire, the drama follows the enigmatic Hartley (played by Michael Socha) as he assembles a gang of local home weavers and farm labourers to embark upon a massive counterfeiting exercise, which, some claim, threatened to capsize the economy and become the biggest fraud in British history. A fascinating fragment of history, then, set in the Promethian dawn of the Industrial Revolution, based on the book by Benjamin Myers, and fictionalised by Shane Meadows – award winners both. I do hope that it lives up to its promise over the course of the next couple of (weekly) episodes, but, by heck, it gets off to unbearably sluggish and sometimes bizarre start.
Forgers and fraudsters usually make for some excellent, pacey cat’n’mouse action, often infused with some sardonic humour along the way; think of Catch Me if You Can (2002), The Counterfeiters (2007), or Private Shultz (1981), to offer a few memorable examples of producers getting it right from the start. The problem with episode one of The Gallows Pole is that the viewer has not an inkling of what excitement may follow.
Almost all the action, for example, takes place in the village pub where the various characters are introduced, reintroduced and then reintroduced again to us. For more than an hour, it drags on without anything much happening. We see the prodigal son David staggering back home with a serious stab wound, having walked all the way up from Birmingham. There, he’d been attacked by a person unknown, who David killed and then fled. He arrives home in time for the burial of his father, and is taken to the village pub to get patched up for the pauper’s funeral. There we meet David’s unremarkable brothers Isaac, William and Tom (Samuel Edward-Cook, Thomas Turgoose, Dave Perkins), his equally nondescript wife Grace (Sophie McShera), plus some rough-hewn rural types leaning heavily towards stereotype, not to say financial ruin as the home weaving trade collapses.
We do notice David has a lot of money, but we don’t really clock that he’s been in the booming metal-bashing shops of Brummagem learning how to counterfeit high-value coinage. Our understanding of events isn’t helped by the lead figure being delirious for most of the time. Socha is great at being semi-conscious, and I mean that in a good way, but watching him hallucinate in the primitive dark boozer just tends to add to the audience’s confusion. Things, in other words, are about as suspenseful as an episode of Emmerdale centred on the Woolpack. We could have usefully got going on the caper in episode one, and benefitted from the always enriching presence of Ralph Ineson as a reet bastard boss (but we don’t see him until much later).
The story is also slowed down by some frankly gratuitous Gothic schtick – fantasy sequences where David is led across moors with a bunch of blokes got up with stag skulls, antlers and billowing druidical vestments, like a cross between the coronation and a particularly camp Hammer House of Horror movie. Parts of these scenes are actually ludicrous, especially the chief stag man whose voice is made all the more incongruous in the West Riding of Yorkshire because it sounds like the very American sadistic avenger in the Saw movies. ‘Appen he’s been t’Colonies. Some of the other dreamy bits are set to thrashy music by the Swedish psychedelic group Goat, which is also silly, but at least makes for visually distracting, though irrelevant, lacunae. As if all of that wasn’t enough to get in the way of developing the story, the producers have inexplicably included far too many full-length folk songs, turgid and cloying even by the standards of that benighted genre. That stuff might have been all very well for a night out in the 1760s, but, despite a recent modest revival, it’s surely not what we need from our peak-time viewing in the 2020s. Nor, I’d gently suggest, is the unsubtle attempt to link the privations of that time to those of today.
The Gallows Pole is innovative, and very self-consciously a different kind of period drama. The use of fresh local talent in some of the roles works is a nice touch, yielding some promising newcomers, such as Stevie Binns (a team leader in a financial firm) and Charlotte Ockelton (a hairdresser). When you can make it out, the contemporary style of dialogue is a refreshing change from the usual crude yokel or mannered Jane Austen stuff. The titles are brilliantly done, and the documentary style of filming works, giving some much-needed authenticity. But all too often, The Gallows Pole is just plain bewildering, and you rarely find yourself asking what happens next, which is really the greatest failing of all.
