You don’t often see a television program based in a part of the country you know well about an incident you remember. Such a program for me is ‘Sherwood.’
It concerns a series of murders committed in a Nottinghamshire mining town or, as we would say, Pit Village. The murders are assumed to be connected with the NUM( National Union of Miners) strike of the 1980s. Part of its membership in Nottinghamshire broke away to form a rival union, UDM (The Union of Democratic Mineworkers). As can be imagined, this caused significant rifts in communities where some remained loyal to the NUM and others joined the UDM. I witnessed a fight in a local gym between two middle-aged men who became incensed over the topic.
Many people faced tremendous hardship as the strike bit, making the bitterness even deeper. Eventually, they returned to work battered and beaten, only to have their mines closed down a few years later by vengeful Conservative ministers.
There’s a lot more to it than I have outlined, but it will do to explain the tensions brilliantly portrayed in the program. Of course, it helps that the writer, James Graham, grew up in the town I lived in and understands the topic only too well.
Even though some of the principles of the cast are not from the area, like David Morrissey and Lesley Manville, they are brilliant actors working from an excellent script and pull it off we some style.
An underlying theme of the series is a betrayal not just among union members but by the police, who used convert operatives to embed themselves in the community and feed intelligence to the high-ups in London.
The mystery is resolved in the final episode, but that is not the point. The main thrust of the series is to reveal the underlying mentality of the local inhabitants, who still to this day refer to their towns as ‘ex-mining communities.’ Their dark art can not leave them because they live in a place stripped of its identity and must continue in this haunted landscape even as their lives move forward.
People have dealt with the story before in a more light-hearted manner ( see Billy Elliott) but never with such unflinching conviction and determination to look the past in the eye and try to come to terms with it.
Popgun 