Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: David Morrisey, Robert Glenister, Lesley Manville, Clair Rushbrook, Joanne Froggatt, Alun Armstrong, Adeel Akhtar, Adam Hugill, Terence Maynard, Andrea Lowe, Lorraine Ashbourne, Clare Holman, Perry Fitzpatrick, Kevin Doyle, Philip Jackson, Stephen Tompkinson, Lindsay Duncan, Bally Gill, Harpel Hayer, Safia Oakley-Green, Chloe Harris, George Howard, Tom Glenister, Bill Jones, Hazel Ellerby, Nadine Marshall, Phaldut Sharma, Leah Walker, Sean Gilder, Charles Dale, Lance O’Reilly-Chapman, Mark Addy, Mark Frost, Pip Torrens, Poppy Gilbert, Jonathan Readwin, Don Gilet, René Zagger, Kwarme Bentil, Kelly Harrison, Neil Ashton, Christopher Fairbank, Sunetra Sarker.
If you want to see where the future of a country lays, then look to its past, examine the moments not of its glory and compassion, but to its darker days, the moments where governments and institutions show you exactly what they think of the public.
In forty years’ time the last few years that we have collectively lived through will be scrutinised in ways we are not yet aware of, the response to Covid, the war in the Ukraine, the damage wrought by leaders and opposition alike, and perhaps our own shortcomings in how we dealt with the continuing punch of crisis after crisis after crisis.
Those forty years, four decades of silence and government gas lighting are what we are now seeing being revealed as the gaze of inspection is shifted to one of deepest shames of modern British history, the scandal, the divide, the continuing despair that resulted in families and friends turning their backs on each other as coal, as miners, became the national focus point, one of community pitted against authority, of tradition battling market forces, of police action that to this day is still being investigated, especially when it comes to the death of a man investigating the deplorable act of planting police spies within the community.
Sherwood is a murder mystery wrapped up in the clothes of truth, the whole damned action of betrayal and sabotage of an industry and one pushed on by determination to put an end to a union that had dealt a previous government a severe bloody nose a decade earlier.
No matter your opinion on the period, whether you see the pain and suffering of one, the families driven to extremes of poverty not seen since the 1930s and which is now in danger of being repeated as the country is hit over and over again with spectres of interest rate rises, inflation running rampant, and a world threatened by unrest, war, disease, and the pestilence of political dogma, Sherwood captures the tension that still sits deep within towns that fought on both sides of the debate, especially in Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire.
Divisions run deep in those old villages and towns, and the hatred has not diminished, and it is to that end that James Graham has created a series that is not only intriguing in its subject matter of a killer on the loose around the remains of the ancient forest of Sherwood, but understanding of how the miner’s strike of 1984-85 shaped the fabric of society they grew up in, the tensions, the fear, the daily trading of the word scab, all of which starts to leave scars and marks on the mind and psyche of the community.
A huge cast, names that exemplify the best of British acting fill the words and scenes, and in eye opening and stirring performances by the likes of David Morrisey as DCS Ian St. Clair, Lesley Manville as Julie Jackson, Adeel Akhtar in perhaps his finest part to date as the grieving train driver Andy Fisher, and Stephen Tompkinson and Lindsay Duncan in brief but pivotal parts that frame the emotion and search for the truth that still haunts those real life pit villages, Sherwood is an examination of truth, of demanding that in forty years’ time we are not apportioning blame at the wrong people, that events such as Orgreave, Hillsborough, Lockerbie, and the damage brought to the town of Hungerford, all tragedies and products of our time, are not repeated again.
A sincere and superb production, James Graham, a product of the ability to study humanities at university, captures the feeling of time with absolution and truth.
Ian D. Hall