Class, community & crafting Sherwood: a conversation with Clio Barnard
The final episode is here! Ease your mourning with these words from the show's lead director
So, you don’t need me to tell you that series two of Sherwood is ending, right? You don’t need me to remind you that it hurts! It’s too soon! How do we live knowing [redacted]! To soothe the pain (mine and yours), I spent some time chatting to the show’s lead director and executive producer, Clio Barnard. Yes, that Clio Barnard. The realism-by-way-of-lyricism filmmaker behind the (kind-of) Bradford Trilogy - The Arbor (her radical Andrea Dunbar documentary AKA one of the greatest British films ever made), The Selfish Giant, and Ali & Ava - her award-hoarding rolling-trio of fiction and non-fiction portraits of working-class life in the West Yorkshire city. She is, quite simply, the secret (loaded) weapon of series two. Clio in lock-step, as one of our very best contemporary chroniclers of working-class life, with writer James Graham on all matters community, class and social justice. There will be light spoilers ahead, so if you are still to start it (what have you been doing?), you might want to save this for later. For the rest of you: dry your eyes, duck. And enjoy. She’s everything you’d hope (and far far more).
Clio! Hi! When I spoke to James, I asked, “Clio? How did that happen?” and he said it was like, oh, wouldn't this be amazing, in my wildest dreams. And then…it happened. What made you say yes to Sherwood?
I read this email saying, “Would you be interested,” and I'm a massive procrastinator, but I did not procrastinate about that. It was just, “Yes, absolutely!” because I loved season one. I thought it was absolutely brilliant. I felt I hadn't seen anything like that on telly since, I don't know…Boys From The Blackstuff, and Alan Clarke, his work for TV was really important to me. [With Sherwood] I was watching something that dealt with the legacy of the miners’ strike, had this incredible cast, where the politics were absolutely upfront and really direct, and the characters were so fantastic.
And that yes was before seeing a script?
They sent me a kind-of outline that James had written, which had all the fundamental stuff that's in season two - the mine, ‘Shottingham’ and a post-industrial vacuum and what happens to the people within that. Bradford, which I've done a deep dive in with the community there, is not dissimilar because it had a thriving textiles industry that just completely disappeared in the ‘80s. And so there are parallels, [it’s] socially and politically close to my heart. TV with a sense of social justice.
[Photo: Nick Wall]
And it’s not conventionally-shot social realism. I rewatched Ali & Ava this weekend, and Bradford looked so beautiful - the same with Sherwood, and Nottingham as a place that has beauty in the soil, in the landscape. How did you bring your eye, your cinematic lens, to series two?
As you know, it’s collaborative and Simon [Tindall] who was the DOP, I'd worked with him before, and I love his work. Whether you're making a film or making television, it's a collective. So we looked at season one a lot because obviously, it's like a relay race - not a race, but you've got to pick up what they were doing and work with that. And obviously our locations were different: I got to go inside the cooling tower, which was basically a dream come true.
And those shots were incredible
Oh, I mean, he's incredibly talented, Simon. And yeah, it was brilliant. It was quite a hard location to find and secure. Actually, it was closing down and the guy who ran it, he loved Sherwood series one, and said yes. We’d asked all these different ones and just thought it's never going to happen, we'll never get to go inside a cooling tower. But there was a lot of love for it because he's part of that deindustrialisation story, this guy who was running that power station. The other new element was Skegness and the coast. And how you get the landscape and the city and all these different elements to play a part within James's storytelling. It was a real joy making this because the intention behind it is so good. And in some ways, I was really happy to be picking up the baton from season one, because it feels like the whole is more important than something like individual style. Yeah, who gives a fuck, really? Because it's about those big themes that James wants a big, popular audience to engage with - and to achieve that, you know, is brilliant.
How granular did you get when trying to maintain certain things from series one and continue into the Sherwood universe? Were there any rules, red lines?
There were things that were already set, like the street where Julie (Lesley Manville)'s house is and the choice of the location [being] Ashfield. And the first thing that we did after I'd replied and said yes, and met everybody, was me and James and Kate Ogborn, the producer, did a trip up to Skeggy and up to James's world, to Ashfield where he grew up. It was a really brilliant thing to do because it gave me so much information in terms of the feel of the place and the understanding of where it was in relation to Nottingham. James wanted it to be more about Nottingham, so Simon and I went back and did lots of shots from rooftops to make sure the city was a really strong presence in the show.
Adeel Akhtar and Claire Rushbrook (Ali & Ava) both starred in series one, and it was cast by the brilliant Shaheen Baig, who you've worked with in the past. Were these indicators that this was a Clio universe as well?
It really felt like that. And also Sean Gilder and Lorraine Ashbourne who I worked with on The Selfish Giant. And I love Lesley Manville and David Morrissey - I think they're brilliant actors.
When it came to collaborating with James, you seem to share a fascination with detail - proper detail - in conveying authenticity. I always think about the pile of dirty mugs on the side in Ali & Ava - not just the token one - which is like every working-class kitchen I’ve been in, where you drink more brews than you can wash cups
He's an absolutely lovely, open, generous collaborator. I just can't say enough good things about him. And in terms of detail, Jane Levick, who was the production designer, her eye for detail is incredible, and her care for the characters and their environments and understanding of how much is conveyed by those small details…It makes the characters feel whole and real, so big up Jane, because she's absolutely brilliant.
I’m thinking about the design of the inside of the Bottomley’s house in particular
It’s an interesting one, actually because James and and I - with Janey as well - there was a digging down: whose house is it, who lived there [before]? You know, stuff that isn't there in the script, but [in] the photographs, their family history that's on the walls. There’s a scene that ended up shorter than it was in the script when [Ryan’s] watching Saturday night and Sunday morning, and there’s this parallel between him there with his shotgun and Albert Finney with his shotgun in Nottingham in the ‘60s, and it's this lovely parallel between those two characters and that film and that history of industry. And then there’s the lace market and all of that - Pam used to work in the lace factory - so that deep storytelling in a way is done through a little article on the wall, or a dog. There's a little china dog that in Saturday night and Sunday Morning gets its ear shot off, so Janey went and got these little porcelain dogs recreated and that's what gets shot when their house gets shot…Those details, they do matter.
I want to talk about how you worked with the actors on some of the new characters - and can't wait another second without saying Monica Dolan and Ann Fucking Branson…
So, this is a bit of a tangent, but female characters of a certain age are the heart of this story. Thank you, James Graham, because there's not enough of that. And also a bit of a tangent, I love your Substack and was looking at the thing about how few female directors of my age there are out there. And you kind of think, fucking hell, that's really shocking. Anyway, that's the sort of side issue - or maybe it’s central - but you can see how we end up where we end up, right? And I think when somebody like Ann Branson comes along - I mean, she'd be an extraordinary character no matter the landscape - but when the landscape is barren, and, you know, we women of midlife and over are invisible, and if they are visible, we know every trope going…The reality is that if there were more women over 40, 50, 60, writing scripts and making television, that would shift. So, Monica, she is a fucking extraordinary actress, I worked with her on The Arbor. I remember the very first time I met her - she walked in when we were casting and I just thought this, this woman is amazing, and I want to work with her. And she is forensic in the way that she'll dive into a character and and prep for a role - she'll make decisions about things, and you just totally trust them. We talked quite a lot about grief and Ann Branson’s response to grief, and revenge, her status. There's something very, very twisted in her that turns that energy of grief into something very brutal. Like, beyond brutal…
The new young men are also incredible - like Oliver Huntingdon (Ryan Bottomley), who had a smaller role in Happy Valley and was trained at the Television Workshop. Who we meet as we follow him out of the forest, looking about seven feet tall, doing that insane neck-crick-move, his eyes…
The Television Workshop is phenomenal, we'll start there. Honestly, I think every city should have one and follow that model. Because you think Samantha Morton, Jack O'Connell, the list [of those who trained there] is massive, such fantastic actors, people from working-class backgrounds on the whole. It’s a shining example of what the arts can do, a good use of public money, and how transformative it can be - not just for the community and for those people, but for us as viewers. And yes, I would really like to talk about Oliver Huntingdon, because I think he's brilliant. And that scene of him walking in was not as seen in the script, it wasn’t a scripted scene. It was about wanting to join up the the walk from the woods so you understood the street where Julie lives [in relation], and a storytelling thing: this is a threat coming into town. And when Ollie very first came into the casting, and he's really big guy, it was just like, yeah, that's him. He was absolutely fizzing with the energy of it, and you could see what he was going to bring to it. And as I say, I'm a massive fan of Alan Clarke, and so Simon and I talked a lot about these following shots and leading shots and using the steadicam. That was the first shot we did with Ollie and I didn't quite realise how charismatic his version of that character was going to be until we did that shot. That particular look, he brought [in] when we did the rehearsals. He came in with this notebook, he opened it and showed me these two pictures of a hyena that he'd cut out and put in his notebook. And that’s his hyena look. It's really amazing. And I think he'd really thought about that. It was just this visual trigger for him. I don't want to over-intellectualise it, because it was a picture and it worked, but there's something very specific about a hyena. And then the other thing was his bond with Stephie (Bethany Asher) and the way that they built that was phenomenal. And with Charlene White, who plays Pam, his mum, that scene of trying to understand what has happened in this family, and the backstory we had to build around that. And so that scene needed to do so much in terms of creating a kind of empathy for him, and understanding that there's this whole load of people who've been abandoned. And if you do that, and then other forces start to take hold, a lot of that story is told through Oliver's character…It matters to me. I care a lot and it’s partly why I made The Selfish Giant after The Arbor because of getting to know boys who were not getting a secondary school education at all, were essentially very misunderstood. Also, I think, and I don't know this might be bollocks, but there's a strong matriarchal feeling in that community, in those communities in Bradford and I think the boys [can] seem so lost to me, and sort of criminalised. And, you know, it's a crisis of not quite understanding who they're meant to be, or how they're meant to be, or, you know, feeling demonised. And it's really, really upsetting.
You are one of the great chroniclers and documentarians of working class life. What’s your own personal relationship with class?
We could probably talk about it for the rest of the day, but, yeah, James’ [MacTaggart] lecture was brilliant, and he talked about working-class as being cultural. And I was thinking about that, and thinking the culture in my home was middle-class, thoroughly middle-class. You know, I was brought up by my dad, a single dad, a university lecturer, and yeah, it was middle-class. And my environment in terms of my school and my peers, my mates, was on the whole working-class. And the other thing he's right about is people get a bit squeamish and awkward talking about it, and I find it awkward and squeamish. I can feel like that, too. So, just sort of laying that on the table is useful, because then we can say, oh, yeah, why does it feel so weird to talk about? And I've had lots of interviews where people kind of try and worm out what class I am. It’s like, you just asked me straight. I'm not hiding anything. I suppose what's happened, and in a way, part of what I was trying to do with The Arbor, was look[ing] at representations of working-class communities by drilling down into one very specific working class-community that had been represented by somebody who was from that community. Making The Arbor meant I couldn't un-know what I got to know through making it. And those became the stories that I wanted to tell, and of that community in particular - I felt very driven to talk about the boys who were hanging around the set. And then, in a way, that then led on to wanting to make Ali and Ava, because of this brilliant woman that I met who Ava is based on. I [always] try to bake into the form: how do we represent communities like like this? And why do we represent them in that way? And what is social realism and what is verbatim theatre, and why? Why do we use one camera technique for one type of story, and one camera technique for another type of story? The other thing that's happened over the last 10 years is there's been this question of positionality: who are you to tell this story? Which is such a brilliant and valid question. And in a way, I've got no right to tell those stories, because that's not my background. [But] in a way, the films are collaborative portraits, so I work with the people who are being represented on screen, through interviews, workshops, getting the actors to meet the people, and maybe if I had grown up in that community, I wouldn't be needing to do that in that way. And working with James, I didn’t need to that because he is that person…
And we really could have talked for the rest of the day, but I allowed brilliant, generous Clio to crack on with her day, relieved - as someone usually found marching through the streets screaming for working-class storytellers - that we have Clio Barnard to so empathetically, poetically, full-heartedly tell the stories that so rarely get told. Putting her with James Graham? Now that really was the genius move…