The moment chilling BBC thriller ‘manifested biggest strike in the UK’-Meghna Amin-Entertainment – Metro

Sherwood writer James Graham has reflected on a poignant moment from the hit BBC thriller’s first series that foreshadowed the biggest strikes in the UK.

In June 2022, the David Morrissey-starring series launched, plummeting the 1980s Nottingham miners’ strike back into the spotlight.

It followed the trauma that left the community broken decades after the strikes, and ongoing tensions with the police, sparked by a series of murders.

At the time, Graham wanted to tell a story inspired by the trauma and the divisions in a community that continue to exist today, but little did he know how his story would mirror modern history.

Around the show’s premiere, RMT staff voted to strike over pay, jobs and conditions disputes in the biggest strike the country had ever seen.

The industrial action threatened to bring the country to a standstill, and increased tensions between transport staff and the government – which continues now.

Ahead of the second season of Sherwood, screenwriter Graham remarked on the link between his drama and recent events.

Sherwood followed the decades-long impact of the 1980s miners’ strikes (Picture: BBC)

‘That was a strange time,’ he began.

‘I remember the episode in the first series where Lindsay Duncan was talking to [David Morrissey] and it was almost like Lindsay Duncan manifested the biggest strike in the UK that evening, because the morning after the RMT came out, it was the biggest industry action since the miners’ strike.

‘I guess something was just in the air at the time.’

The scene Graham referred to saw Duncan playing the National Union of Mineworkers lawyer and activist, and, in reference to the government’s approach to the 80s miners’ strike, said: ‘God, we’re an old country. 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 this sweeping under the carpet of it all, and refusing to just bloody look at it and learn from it.

One monologue in the BBC thriller foreshadowed the RMT strikes in 2022 (Picture: BBC)

‘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 deregulation market forces.

‘Reasonable people can agree or disagree with that shift, 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.’

Sherwood is now returning for a second series (Picture: BBC/House Productions/Sam Taylor)

She continued: ‘If they used spies to stir up trouble or tear people apart, well you never stood a chance.

‘Hillsborough, the miners’ strike, phone hacking, Steven 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.’

Talking about the divide between police and communities, Graham also commented on Sherwood reflecting modern-day tensions between the two, especially in the wake of Sarah Everard’s death and the Black Lives Matter protests.

He told Metro.co.uk: ‘We had a bit of it in the first series, I think we [aired] around the time of Sarah Everard, and policing of Black Lives Matter, and it was just a complete breakdown in people’s faith in that institution.

The upcoming instalment will continue to focus on the divide between police and communities (Picture: BBC/House Productions/Sam Taylor)

‘I think that unfortunately, it only got worse since then, and I don’t know whether the new government will change that dialogue, but it feels like we are in conversation about that social contract with the police, and what is a healthy version of that.

‘In our show some of that is really historic, I was quite pleased to be able to show particularly to a younger audience who would never have understood that that goes back for mining communities, for 40 years, that toxic relationship with the police because of how they behaved in that strike.’

He added: ‘It’s not every single individual, their job is incredibly hard but something has gone wrong.

‘Something has gone wrong institutionally and I think even the Met Police have acknowledged that something has completely gone wrong in the structure of how that’s organized.’

Sherwood series two launches at 9pm on Sunday, August 25, on BBC iPlayer and BBC One, with new episodes premiering on Sunday and Monday nights across three weeks.

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