The BBC’s latest – and let me say up top, one of its greatest – drama series, Sherwood, opens with footage of the 1980s miners’ strike. Arthur Scargill shouting, Margaret Thatcher speechifying (that pained and painful voice hurling you back into the past), police dragging people from the picket line, children screaming “scab” at those crossing it. To anyone over the age of 45 or so, it feels like yesterday.
Which is very much the point. Sherwood’s six episodes (airing on Monday and Tuesday nights for three weeks) centre on two shocking murders that took place in real life in 2004, near where writer James Graham grew up, in the Nottinghamshire mining district of Ashfield. Out of these terrible events, Graham, as perhaps only a native – albeit one blessed with his talent – could, conjures a portrait as moving as it is convincing of a place steeped in historic grief and bitterness, full of personal enmities and festering wounds, but bound still by them all.
