James Graham on class, craft and SHERWOOD

The BBC drama has taken the country by storm. The creator and writer talks to WHITE NOISE about how he made such phenomenal telly

It’s the BBC drama that has grabbed the nation by the scruff of its neck every Monday and Tuesday night for the last three weeks. Insanely well-plotted and written with a rare specificity of time and place; beautifully shot; a raft of iconic performances from iconic actors (Lesley Manville, Adeel Akhtar and David Morrissey to name just three) and a handful of superbly-landed, proper to-the-socks shocks. Sherwood is not here to fuck about.

It tells the story of two seemingly random killings in Ashfield, a Nottinghamshire pit village still bearing the scars of the 1984 miners’ strike. Scars kept fresh today by deep enduring divisions and rumours of Spy Cops - undercover officers sent in to monitor the locals - who may not have left when the crisis ended forty years prior.

The man behind Sherwood, playwright and screenwriter (and actual OBE) James Graham (Brexit: An Uncivil War; Quiz), was born and raised in Ashfield, which saw itself gripped by two real-life murders in 2004 - those killings, and the ensuing manhunt, have now been heavily fictionalised on screen. But what this isn’t is a run-of-the-mill crime procedural. Part thriller, part gold-standard drama, part social and political commentary, part plea for community, Sherwood is British telly at its very, very best.

The day before the sixth and final episode, we zoomed it up with James from his home in London. And it turns out that you can take the working-class boy out of the East Midlands…

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First of all, congratulations! You must be blown away by the response. 

Yeah, you’re always slightly worried. Obviously it's a big deal for me, but [you think] am I just seeing a filter bubble of people being very nice and actually, it's not cutting through beyond my Twitter feed? But no, it really seems to have done and I'm genuinely touched and relieved. This one hasn't been always that easy, just because it's quite close to home - like literally, it's my home. And my community. And I knew there was going to be a level of pain and aggro and anxiety that came with that. And it's not been easy to carry some people with you, so you go, I just hope therefore it’s going to be worth it.

Presumably it helps being local - and I assume you wouldn’t want just anyone to tackle it - but there’s also a bit of distance, because you moved away? 

I mean, I think anyone can write anything, but I do think increasingly it's important that you feel are you the right person to write this story. There’s obviously stories that I don't think I’m the right person to write, but this one - it felt like if someone was going to do it, it probably should be me. I don't know if there's ever been an equivalent of a true crime story being written by someone who lives in that community, or was just a few streets away. But having said that, just thinking about the second part of your question, I think that distance probably was helpful. But it's been really strange: I've never felt impostor syndrome before - and not in an arrogant way, because I come like you from a very working class background - but I've never been that bothered or shy about knocking on important or powerful people's doors; going into Parliament and Downing Street saying, ‘I want to tell this story’. [But] there's something about going back home that did alight in me loads of shame and anxiety. About oh, my accent is gone, and I left and I'm absolutely not living the life of the people I'm pretending to represent. And you're going to hear me going on radio all the time going ‘Well, yes, authenticity, authenticity’, but is it authentic, because my experience is removed from that now? It's just a very strange thing that I'm still thinking about - why the thing that is closest to me in the world gave me the most anxiety about authenticity.

Well, you are now middle class, in terms of profession and your economic circumstance. And presumably, there might be a concern of people thinking you’re judging the town that you've left - that kind of narrative.

Definitely and I was always very clear that the the town and the place itself should be a character in the show. That, you know, the East Midlands and Nottinghamshire does not enjoy the cultural specificity of somewhere like Liverpool or even Sheffield, which is only half an hour up the road. There's a blank spot I think in most people's mind about what that is. And it's not quite Northern, it's not quite Midlands. So I was so excited about giving some idiosyncrasies and specificity to a place in a modern BBC audience's mind. But then yes, what version of that place, because my version is only going to be my version. And my family still live there - my mum works in a local shop and my stepdad works night shifts in the local warehouse. And also specifically, my family's weren't down the mines, and the legacy of the miners strike and the collapse of that industry is a prominent feature. But I think, as British screenwriters go, I'm as near as dammit to be able to tell the story, and also just have an absolute humility and self-awareness about what your gaps are.

Is there also the sense of wanting to humanise these communities and the people in them? We talk a lot about the red wall these days, but still so often deal in caricatures of the working-class. These characters are proper flesh and blood, flawed real people

The way these communities are often spoken about is that there’s this homogenous, single identity - everybody is leave-voting, working-class, socially-conservative; works in industry or manufacture; [they’re] white. And it's obviously not true in my town and the town on screen in Sherwood: people voted leave, people voted remain, there's working class and there's middle class, there's educated and non-educated, there is love and there is hate. In 2019 Ashfield famously tipped Conservative for the first time in a generation, and it's this community that had that possibly toxic relationship with the Conservative Party 40 years ago, now voting Conservative. But even in that, I know so many people - either the sons or daughters of mining families, or miners themselves - who voted Conservative for the first time, and it was not just a reckless, thoughtless, ignorant thing. They wrestled with that, that was a philosophical question. And it was not taken lightly or done carelessly, or without thought. I'm glad other people have really connected with that also, because it's a fucking crime drama - you don't normally get time to actually have human beings with inconsistent feelings. And it's that actually, inconsistency, that I really love in people because I'm as inconsistent as fuck. Complex and complicated people behaving paradoxically and strangely is absolutely fine. And drama can contain that and should contain that.

I want to talk about how it was shot. Dramas that feature working-class communities are often not beautiful. And what struck me about Sherwood is how it was shown as seductive and quite gorgeous.

It was so important. I think it's probably the first thing I raised, when I met our lead director Lewis Arnold, who comes from the West Midlands. We just didn't want that cliche of ‘it's grim up north’, whatever that means. You know, rain, always quite low, quite dark. It helps that one of the great motifs of the show is the woods and the English Pastoral lush green. But there's [even] a way of doing that that's really bleak. And so I'm so grateful to Lewis and secondary director Ben [Williams] and the DOPs who from the very beginning, wanted to wrap these people's lives in a lushness and a scale that was seductive.

As you say, it is a crime drama, but not a procedural - and it’s also a thriller and deals with memory and legacy and Spy Cops...How do you keep all of the different threads balanced?

I guess [a crime drama] was always a starting point. I never did just think of it as a manhunt or crime procedural. I knew it wanted to be a social political commentary of a place and time and the legacy of industry in this country and of community. So I thought the way in for an audience, a BBC One audience, would be there's a murder. But then very quickly, people would sense that it was something else. Consciously or subconsciously, I didn't see them as separate threads. I didn't see it as I should do a bit about the political stuff now and then go back to the police. As we all know, painfully, increasingly, the political and the personal is intertwined and whether a police officer is trying to find a clue or deal with his shame of betraying his class, it's all in every moment in every scene. And also deliberately disrupting audience's expectations every step of the way,. So telling people who the killer is [in episode one]; I think constantly pulling the rug from the audience about what the series is about hopefully expands what the audience thinks drama can do.

Normally we see strikers versus the police, but you had a much more delicate line to walk - we have the strikers and then those who crossed the picket lines, plus the local police who had to police their own communities. Did you want to show everyone’s perspective?

Yeah, which sounds really centrist dad, doesn't it? But it's often thought of as miners against police or miners against the government. But I think the most painful elements of this in retrospect, is realising that the government's strategy was an overt one of dividing people against one another - their best weapon was to split communities, whether that was splitting off Nottinghamshire from Yorkshire, Kent, Wales, Scotland, or finding ways to split communities themselves. That breaking solidarity was the best weapon to winning. Just the language around it, that we all are very familiar with - "the enemy within” - I mean, how you can speak about a couple of hundred thousand people and their families like that? Then my natural empathy [was] for everybody being placed into a situation they did not ask for, that they were absolutely engineered towards losing. I think the value of drama is always in these real world stories. Even with something like Brexit, the value of you going on the exercise of walking in the footsteps of people you might disagree with, and an audience doing that in the nuance and space that is drama, unlike the brief black and white relentless extremities of social media, I think that's that's the value of art in this space.

But I’m guessing it’s more of a responsibility with normal people - as opposed to Dominic Cummings and Murdoch, who are powerful men.

God, yeah and public figures with a with a level of expectation that someone's going to play them one day. Which is why we aggressively fictionalised the real people. Because I just didn't want to put my neighbours through having to literally relive it again.

And how did how did you work with the local community?

I tentatively spoke to some of the police officers first, who did the real case, and got in contact with one of the family of the first real life victim and just began talking. That was probably about two and a half years ago. I started to try and measure both the appetite for this story and try to understand what the most responsible way to tell it was. And you just have to go and honestly and sincerely, genuinely, really listen. And I think it's fair to say that there were a lot of people who thought now is probably the right time to tell this story. And then there were some people who really didn't want that to happen and they've gone on record to say they they would prefer not, understandably. So you just have to weigh it up and I took the view that on balance, I knew people were happy to go with me on this journey, but to take the responsibility to distance it from everybody else, so they didn't have to relive it. That felt like the right thing to do.

As you say, it feels like the right time for lots of reasons. But you could never have imagined it would air during the rail strikes!

I know, Jesus Christ. I feel like eight months ago when Lindsey Duncan spoke those words [in episode four’s monologue], she cast some kind of spell and manifested the biggest industrial strike in 30 years. And yeah, either the schedulers are wizards or it's something in the zeitgeist that just guides you towards certain things. Crazy.

Thinking of villages and towns like the ones we’ve been talking about - how do they move forward? The ones that are still so scarred?

That is very good question and I probably wouldn't presume to know the answer, except that part of it is looking at and acknowledging the thing that's wrong, and speaking the words out loud and not suppressing it and repressing it. And people can disagree about whether or not the mines had to close, should have closed that way, it's not even really about that - it's the inhumanity of doing it in the way that happened and not replacing it with anything else, [like] investment, training. Even the language about levelling up, it still identifies these places as being solely trapped in the past and if we can't talk about what the new purpose, the new identity of these places could be, then I don't we're going to move on, I also really firmly believe, and lockdown convinced me of this even more, that place is still a physical thing. Communities are physical and real. And [there’s a] desire from people locally still to see themselves as part of a collective but there’s a lack of public realm, the lack of spaces to physically do that, with pubs closing and clubs and libraries and any other leisure centres. What is a high street when everyone's buying this stuff online? Space and place are key contributors to feeling like you're part of a community and therefore can collectively move your community forward. And I would say this, wouldn't I, but culture is so key to that. And having places where you can go and watch live music and entertainment and comedy or shows - and without that stuff, everyone's just getting angry on Facebook. And I don't think solutions will be found in that space.

From a working-class background, you’ve achieved extraordinary things. With the recent news, not least around humanities degrees, do you think it’s progressively becoming harder for people like you?

Yeah, measurably so. Not even just anecdotally, measurably, statistically so. It’s always been hard, there has always been a disadvantage to coming from certain backgrounds. My one hope and my one optimism is if you do a show like Sherwood, it just does matter to hear voices that you recognise and see places that you're from. And it not all be period, it not all be posh and it not all be southern. Even if it just psychologically unlocks something for you and you go, ‘I feel heard, maybe I can tell my story’. I remember all those Granada dramas growing up - [by] Paul Abbot and Sally Wainwright - which I wouldn't have been a writer without. But that's a really light gloss on a really shitty situation that's only going to get worse. And I see no policy ideas or even passion from the industry or from government to radically reverse this. But the baffling lack of awareness that the creative industries is one of the last remaining success stories in terms of global influence - and then you're closing down degree courses, largely in red brick universities, which have more of a cohort of lower socio-economic backgrounds. I just don't know what they're doing. I don't think it's a conspiracy because you can measure the benefit of culture and arts and entertainment on the economy. It's just carelessness and ignorance and the culture wars...And it's so brilliant and correct that under representation of different groups is now being really fought for, whether that's disability, whether that's race, or that's the gender gap. But because class is so hard to define, everyone finds it vaguely embarrassing and vaguely squeamish. And unless you find a language around it, then we’re not going to be able to solve it.

SHERWOOD is on BBC One tonight at 9pm. The first five episodes are on BBC iPlayer