Minefields:Sherwood.

"What else is there to do round here but remember?" - Fred Rowley

There are no coal mines left in Nottinghamshire these days but, if Sherwood (BBC1/iPlayer) is to be believed - and much of it does feel very believable, the former pit villages of that county contain more than enough metaphorical minefields to create both palpable tension and serious danger for those that still live there.

While Sherwood (written by James Graham, directed by Lewis Arnold and Ben A. Williams) is, on the face of it, a fairly standard police drama/murder hunt, it is also, quite clearly, a portrait of a village that, somewhere along the line, lost its identity. Of a people abandoned, or used as pawns, by a political class that have no genuine interest in their well-being.

It's a masterclass in peeling back the COAL NOT DOLE stickers to show the bruised body of a once proud community and it tackles, over its six hour length, themes as important as family, loss, betrayal, guilt, work, grief (specifically in its unexplored form), and toxic male pride. It shows how a place can carry its scars for years, decades even, and how, given adequate provocation, those scars can still tear open and bleed.

Vintage footage of the miner's strike, Arthur Scargill, Margaret Thatcher (alongside some heavily redacted print) show where this all started but Sherwood refuses to be either schematic or doctrinaire and boldly tells the story from all sides. Which means there's a lot of characters to get to know. That starts off a tiny bit confusing but ends up working brilliantly to the show's benefit.

Gary (Alun Armstrong) and Julie Jackson (Lesley Manville) live on a pleasant enough terrace. They've got their grandkids, Cinderella (Safia Oakley-Green) and Noah (Lance O'Reilly-Chapman) staying with them and Gary, a proud man who joined the strike and has never been able to forgive those who didn't, enjoys the odd pint of 'mix' before returning to his adoring, and happy, family.

 

 

Julie doesn't get on with her sister Cathy (Claire Rushbrook) despite her only living down the road with husband Fred Rowley (Kevin Doyle), a miner who stayed in work during the strike - much to Gary's chagrin, and Fred's errant son Scott (Adam Hugill) who is due to be sent to prison for benefit fraud.

It's safe to say the Rowley's home life is less happy than the Jacksons. The Fishers are another lot who, despite their nice house and large garden, seem to have a few problems. Father Andy (Adeel Akhtar) has recently lost his wife and feels he is losing his grown up son Neel (Bally Gill) to Neel's new wife Sarah (Joanne Froggatt).

Sarah is a local Conservative councillor, one of Boris Johnson's proud - and unethical - 'Red Wall' intake. Andy is a Labour man through and through and he's also something of a nerd. He not only works as a train driver, it seems that trains are pretty much his sole topic of conversation and he struggles in almost all social interactions.

Despite this, he appears to be a kind man - if one lacking in self-awareness. Then there's the Sparrow family. There's something of the Snells from Ozark about them. They're painted as wrong 'uns from the get go. Father Mickey (Philip Jackson) and mother Daphne (Lorraine Ashbourne) run an archery and axe throwing business, and eldest son Rory (Perry Fitzpatrick) drives taxis but it's quite clear that most of their earnings are made illegally.

To further muddy the waters, the Sparrow's youngest son Ronan (Bill Jones) has started dating Cinderella Jackson. Then, halfway through the first episode, one of the chief protagonists is murdered - by an unseen man with a bow and arrow. That sets in motion a series of events that will reopen old wounds, reanimate restive enmities, and threaten people's marriages, livelihoods, and even lives.

DCI Ian St Clair (David Morrissey), a local copper, is called in to investigate but St Clair, despite being something of a straight arrow (pun half-intended), receiving a special commendation, and living in a nice big house with his wife Helen (Clare Holman) has his own demons to deal with. The fact him and Clare have not had children seems to be a sore point and there's a brother who St Clair doesn't want to talk about.

His team, DS Cleaver (Terence Maynard) and DI Taylor (Andrea Lowe), are soon joined by a Met officer whom St Clair has history with. DI Kevin Salisbury (Robert Glenister) is more maverick than St Clair and he's been in Notts before - during the mining strike. Salisbury's going through a tough divorce, living with his son, and is in financial difficulty.

He's also in trouble for assaulting another (racist) police officer. The memories of a youthful affair that haunt Salisbury, and what he gave up for love, become key to untangling some of the mysteries of the past and that is done with no little expertise. It's a gripping watch and as soon as one episode ends you find yourself firing up the next one immediately.

Sherwood does a good job of showing the prosaic side of life in Britain:- there are people drinking in dingy pubs and clubs, sitting at home watching Antiques Roadshow, car radios and jukeboxes blast out Nik Kershaw and Franz Ferdinand and there's the occasional joke about old people making references to things young people don't know about. Trevor Francis for example. Or Rod Hull and Emu.

But fizzing away beneath this ordinariness (and regional specificism - people say "daft apeth" and "fuck this for a game of soldiers") there is rampant suspicion (often of the police and definitely of the Met - but sometimes simply of one's neighbours), there's themes of hacking and 'spy cops', there's a character who goes on a Raoul Moat style odyssey, and there's even a bit of a Romeo and Juliet thing going on with Ronan and Cinderella.

At times, the show hews towards Scandinavian style television like Mikael Marcimain's The Hunt For A Killer or Tobias Lindholm's The Investigation in that it focuses on police numbers, time restraints, and pure logistics. When senior officers ask St Clair not to pursue a particular avenue of investigation you are reminded of Line of Duty. With several cast members appearing in both shows, it's not the first time.

But, at all times, you are carried along by the story and you're never quite sure what direction it will take. There is a bizarre, funny yet awkward, speech at a wedding reception and then an even more uncomfortable display of generational differences that results in a very embarrassing bluetooth wanking incident, there are great cameos from Sean Gilder as former 'scab' Dean Simmons and Nadine Marshall as Jenny Harris - a woman from Salisbury's past, but there is also a genuinely chilling scene where a character's true identity is revealed to us.

There are fantastic performances all round (praise specifically to the likes of Akhtar, Oakley-Green, Glenister and, most of all, to Manville and Rushbrook who provide the beating heart of the drama) and these all help in creating what is far more than a simple whodunnit police drama. Sherwood is that but it is also an exquisitely rendered paean to lost youth and to lost opportunity.

In the facial expressions of the younger characters we see the confusion as to why so many in their community, in their country, carry so many historical prejudices with them. There is a deep and troubling sadness at the heart of Sherwood, at the heart of Britain, that as I grow older I lose hope of ever seeing lifted. We are, it seems, doomed to fight the same old battles over and over again. If Sherwood does nothing else, it should make us question just how healthy that is.