'Sherwood' - James Graham's home-truths

With two episodes to go, I really ought to pause before declaring James Graham’s Sherwood the best British drama of recent times. But why wait? Particularly when a speech leaps out at you from the television screen with such force and resonance that you immediately want to skip back a minute and listen over and over again.  

Briefly, and in case you are not watching, Sherwood is the story of murder and manhunts in a Nottinghamshire mining village, and the historical deployment of ‘spy-cops’, undercover police infiltrating a community - indeed, forming romantic relationships with members of that community - who then report back to the powers that be.   

It is writing of the highest order. Unflinching, humane, and based on facts that have bubbled slowly and inexorably to the surface. I’ve enjoyed Graham’s work previously - Quiz was enormous fun, and his debut play This House gave me a fascinating overview of what was going on politically in the late 1970s. But this is something else. Graham’s writing fleshes out and captures a small community, yet - and I think this is the drama’s genius - never takes its eyes off the wider national picture. 

Back to that speech, though. It is one that left me angry, gripped and in awed admiration of Graham’s skills as a writer. It leaves you shaking your head at the past and even more furious with the present. Standing outside of Newstead Abbey, Jennifer Hale, a former lawyer for the National Union of Miners, tells the two investigating police officers - and ourselves - some home-truths about her fight to expose the spy-cops. Rather than read the lines below, hone in to 32:40 of episode 4 of Sherwood on BBC iPlayer, and watch as the wonderful Lindsay Duncan lights a cigarette and delivers the lesson with aplomb. 

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"God, we’re an old country. Look at this place. So much past. Which means unfortunately, quite a lot of mistakes. But it’s not the getting things wrong that’s the problem. It’s the sweeping under the carpet of it all and refusing to just bloody look at it and learn from it.

"When the Thatcher government’s cabinet papers were released under the 30 year rule, even I, a mad cynic, needed a stiff drink. It’s all there in black and white, the Ridley Report, by a future Tory Secretary of State. They wanted that strike. They wanted to change the political landscape of this country away from collectivism towards deregulated market forces. And reasonable people can agree or disagree with that shift. But the point is in order to achieve it they needed a war. They needed to - and I quote - ‘provoke a strike in nationalised industries’ - and they picked coal and they won. And this country changed forever.

"And Christ, if they used spies to stir up trouble and tear people apart … well, you never stood a chance. Hillsborough, the Miner’s Strike, phone-hacking, Stephen Lawrence … some of the most unsavoury aspects of British policing over the last half a century that we are managing to drag out of the darkness and into the light. It all demands justice. And you know what, you do too. Keep going."

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Those lines have it all. The heft and universality of Shakespeare, the Englishness and specificity of Alan Bennett, and a wisdom and anger that matches David Simon in The Wire.  

Sherwood is not about murder, or serial killers, or working out who did what. It’s about the United Kingdom. Where we, as a nation, have come from, how we got to where we are, and what is happening to us - on a daily basis - right now. Karl Marx, as he occasionally did, got it spot on: history as tragedy which will then repeat itself as farce. As the RMT (the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers) - quite rightfully - strikes, and the government seeks - ineffectually and maliciously - to divide and conquer, and the Metropolitan Police is put into special measures, James Graham's words should be required reading for anyone with a conscience or an interest in justice. Read it back again and make sure you pay attention to that ‘and I quote’. There is certainly a lot of dramatic license in Sherwood, but those particular words are facts laid out in ‘black and white’ in the Ridley Report. Then look towards the band of  venal, self-serving charlatans and incompetents in power at the moment and vote them out at the earliest opportunity.