Post by MagdaFR on Jun 4, 2022 11:51:57 GMT
James Graham wrote for a show which is coming this month to the BBC (how I miss the Beebs extension!). It's about some true crimes but it will be too about the people and relationships and drama around what happened with the miners, the strike, etc.
He mentions Brexit and BC but I'm putting it here because I like how he writes and I'm interested on the miners strike. Also, I don't know if is behind a paywall.
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/james-graham-on-sherwood-bbc-one-q00v2b7c0
He mentions Brexit and BC but I'm putting it here because I like how he writes and I'm interested on the miners strike. Also, I don't know if is behind a paywall.
Home is not an original theme for writers. And true crime might seem even less original, given how much of it dominates our screens. But it’s perhaps rare for a writer to face a story that allows an interrogation of where they came from and yet is also inspired in part by a truly shocking crime that took place in the streets where they lived.
I tiptoed gently into the genre only recently in the form of Quiz, which dramatised the “coughing major” scandal on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? — something of a relief in the true crime category in that it thankfully contained no bodies or blood on the floor.
That is not the case with Sherwood.
My home town of Ashfield, specifically the former pit village of Annesley, Nottinghamshire, is a “red wall” community — one of those post-industrial towns that used to be synonymous with the Labour movement thanks to its industrial working-class base until it turned blue in the 2019 election. One of the many communities that for decades felt ignored — economically and politically — only now to feel like they have become the centre of national curiosity and analytical attention.
I was 21 in 2004 when I returned home to north Nottinghamshire having been studying over the border in Yorkshire — a significant county line that plays a role in this hard-to-believe and difficult-to-understand story.
I remember the helicopters in the sky and the long line of police officers standing on the bypass running alongside the old woods that once made up the ancient Sherwood Forest, ready to march inside to search for — improbably in such a quiet and unassuming community — two separate killers.
But looking closer, you would see that these were not local Nottinghamshire officers. They were from the London Met, and they had been here before, 20 years prior, during the violent and historically seismic miners’ strike. It had not ended well.
What had brought them back to the village in their hundreds, decades on?
A former miner known as “Froggy” was killed on the street where he lived, a few doors up from my uncle and a couple of streets away from me. A lively and colourful presence around the village, Froggy had been one of the few miners in the community to strike in 1984. Most of his Nottinghamshire colleagues returned to work, to be for ever tarnished with the infamous moniker of “scab” that echoes as a chant around football pitches when Nottinghamshire teams play Yorkshire teams (where solidarity for the strike was almost universal) to this day.
This is a community where, still, brother will cross the street from brother due to the different choices made. There’s one side of the pub, and another. Families broken, friendships never repaired.
The death of this striker was at the hands of someone who hadn’t gone on strike, crossing the picket line to work. For a few days afterwards police and community leaders feared the killing was motivated by this historical feud and might set alight the political divisions that still rumbled underneath the town, as close to the surface as the coal left unmined since the decimation of the industry.
The truth is that the attack had nothing to do with the strike, or any political factions. The victim had never met his killer.
But locally, the memories had been re-awoken; those covered-up scars reappeared. Not just the personal animosity between residents, but a long and difficult relationship between mining communities and their own police.
Sherwood is not a literal adaptation of this tragedy. I’ve had some experience putting real-life people on stage and screen to make some sense of our past and present, our institutions and systems. Having begun writing for theatre, where there is perhaps a stronger tradition of “state of the nation” plays (if such things exist), I was a little unprepared for the reaction towards, say, my film Brexit: The Uncivil War when it was announced, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Dominic Cummings. I received a wave of angry comments questioning why it was happening at all, before any of it had even aired.
My justification for its existence was that drama and storytelling had always played an important role in accessing and translating difficult events for a popular audience. It was the theatre of ancient Greece that came before democracy and created the conditions (tribes travelling together to be in one place) for it to exist. Art and politics have gone hand in hand for centuries.
But this latest and infinitely more personal project felt different from Cummings, Rupert Murdoch (my play Ink) or the coughing major. Those were public figures. My neighbours and the people I grew up with are private individuals not seeking the limelight, and this story — despite the attention it received at the time — had seemingly slipped out of the public consciousness.
I’ve no idea why. Most people I speak to about it can’t particularly recall the real event, despite it being one of the largest manhunts in British history.
The arrival of the London Met into such communities in 1984, billeted from the capital into industrial towns and villages, sleeping on the floors of leisure centres and bus garages for up to a year, caused great animosity, anger and agony back then, with proven accusations of aggressive behaviour towards locals, disproportionate violence and wrongful arrests. It soured the relationship between neighbours and their own local police force — a central narrative in Sherwood, as our fictionalised detective chief superintendent, Ian St Clair, played by David Morrissey, became separated from his family of miners due to his chosen career.
Imagine the trauma, then, when in 2004 the Met Police were forced to return to these villages following the killing of the striking miner, and then — in an unrelated case — a second murder, completely unprecedented in such a quiet community, with the second killer fleeing into the exact same woods. The search demanded many more boots on the ground and — like the miners’ strike – a national response.
For locals in Annesley, it felt like being trapped in a recurrent nightmare that couldn’t end, the past constantly tapping cruelly on the shoulder of the present.
What I’m relieved and grateful to see emerge is a hybrid that is, yes, true crime drama but also social commentary on the search for reconciliation and a new identity in the rubble of the red wall. A thrilling manhunt but also a political history of the legacy of that strike.
It’s inspired by one story, but also allowed me to include many more, including imagining the possible presence of “spy cops” placed into mining communities during 1984, posing as residents, reporting back on the actions of law-abiding men, women and children.
The drama’s ambition is, I hope, realised thanks to an ensemble British cast I could never have dreamt of inhabiting my world growing up in Ashfield, as well as directors, producers and a BBC commissioning team who never once tried to pigeonhole what the drama should be.
I think the genre can take it. I’m reminded of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, a “non-fiction novel” that covered the real murder of a farming family in Kansas, told as though it were both journalism and fiction. A different way to get under the skin of a community, but artistically assess what it all meant and why it mattered.
Stories don’t have to be one thing. Because places are never just one thing. My home contains, yes, working-class and middle-class people, those with connections to the pits and those with none, those on the left and on the right, Leave voters and Remain, as complex and human and inconsistent as anyone else, anywhere else, and it’s been my privilege and pleasure to give them a voice.
Having spent most of my writing life imagining myself into the heads of politicians and public figures, I’m not used to feeling caught out by a trembling of the lip as I type, or a clandestine wipe of a tear in the darkness of an edit suite as the cuts are put together. Maybe this is all just because it feels so close to me — geographically and emotionally. This is not my pain, it’s those of the people whom this story is really about, and for. But home will do funny things to us all.
Sherwood starts on BBC1 on June 13 at 9pm
I tiptoed gently into the genre only recently in the form of Quiz, which dramatised the “coughing major” scandal on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? — something of a relief in the true crime category in that it thankfully contained no bodies or blood on the floor.
That is not the case with Sherwood.
My home town of Ashfield, specifically the former pit village of Annesley, Nottinghamshire, is a “red wall” community — one of those post-industrial towns that used to be synonymous with the Labour movement thanks to its industrial working-class base until it turned blue in the 2019 election. One of the many communities that for decades felt ignored — economically and politically — only now to feel like they have become the centre of national curiosity and analytical attention.
I was 21 in 2004 when I returned home to north Nottinghamshire having been studying over the border in Yorkshire — a significant county line that plays a role in this hard-to-believe and difficult-to-understand story.
I remember the helicopters in the sky and the long line of police officers standing on the bypass running alongside the old woods that once made up the ancient Sherwood Forest, ready to march inside to search for — improbably in such a quiet and unassuming community — two separate killers.
But looking closer, you would see that these were not local Nottinghamshire officers. They were from the London Met, and they had been here before, 20 years prior, during the violent and historically seismic miners’ strike. It had not ended well.
What had brought them back to the village in their hundreds, decades on?
A former miner known as “Froggy” was killed on the street where he lived, a few doors up from my uncle and a couple of streets away from me. A lively and colourful presence around the village, Froggy had been one of the few miners in the community to strike in 1984. Most of his Nottinghamshire colleagues returned to work, to be for ever tarnished with the infamous moniker of “scab” that echoes as a chant around football pitches when Nottinghamshire teams play Yorkshire teams (where solidarity for the strike was almost universal) to this day.
This is a community where, still, brother will cross the street from brother due to the different choices made. There’s one side of the pub, and another. Families broken, friendships never repaired.
The death of this striker was at the hands of someone who hadn’t gone on strike, crossing the picket line to work. For a few days afterwards police and community leaders feared the killing was motivated by this historical feud and might set alight the political divisions that still rumbled underneath the town, as close to the surface as the coal left unmined since the decimation of the industry.
The truth is that the attack had nothing to do with the strike, or any political factions. The victim had never met his killer.
But locally, the memories had been re-awoken; those covered-up scars reappeared. Not just the personal animosity between residents, but a long and difficult relationship between mining communities and their own police.
Sherwood is not a literal adaptation of this tragedy. I’ve had some experience putting real-life people on stage and screen to make some sense of our past and present, our institutions and systems. Having begun writing for theatre, where there is perhaps a stronger tradition of “state of the nation” plays (if such things exist), I was a little unprepared for the reaction towards, say, my film Brexit: The Uncivil War when it was announced, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Dominic Cummings. I received a wave of angry comments questioning why it was happening at all, before any of it had even aired.
My justification for its existence was that drama and storytelling had always played an important role in accessing and translating difficult events for a popular audience. It was the theatre of ancient Greece that came before democracy and created the conditions (tribes travelling together to be in one place) for it to exist. Art and politics have gone hand in hand for centuries.
But this latest and infinitely more personal project felt different from Cummings, Rupert Murdoch (my play Ink) or the coughing major. Those were public figures. My neighbours and the people I grew up with are private individuals not seeking the limelight, and this story — despite the attention it received at the time — had seemingly slipped out of the public consciousness.
I’ve no idea why. Most people I speak to about it can’t particularly recall the real event, despite it being one of the largest manhunts in British history.
The arrival of the London Met into such communities in 1984, billeted from the capital into industrial towns and villages, sleeping on the floors of leisure centres and bus garages for up to a year, caused great animosity, anger and agony back then, with proven accusations of aggressive behaviour towards locals, disproportionate violence and wrongful arrests. It soured the relationship between neighbours and their own local police force — a central narrative in Sherwood, as our fictionalised detective chief superintendent, Ian St Clair, played by David Morrissey, became separated from his family of miners due to his chosen career.
Imagine the trauma, then, when in 2004 the Met Police were forced to return to these villages following the killing of the striking miner, and then — in an unrelated case — a second murder, completely unprecedented in such a quiet community, with the second killer fleeing into the exact same woods. The search demanded many more boots on the ground and — like the miners’ strike – a national response.
For locals in Annesley, it felt like being trapped in a recurrent nightmare that couldn’t end, the past constantly tapping cruelly on the shoulder of the present.
What I’m relieved and grateful to see emerge is a hybrid that is, yes, true crime drama but also social commentary on the search for reconciliation and a new identity in the rubble of the red wall. A thrilling manhunt but also a political history of the legacy of that strike.
It’s inspired by one story, but also allowed me to include many more, including imagining the possible presence of “spy cops” placed into mining communities during 1984, posing as residents, reporting back on the actions of law-abiding men, women and children.
The drama’s ambition is, I hope, realised thanks to an ensemble British cast I could never have dreamt of inhabiting my world growing up in Ashfield, as well as directors, producers and a BBC commissioning team who never once tried to pigeonhole what the drama should be.
I think the genre can take it. I’m reminded of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, a “non-fiction novel” that covered the real murder of a farming family in Kansas, told as though it were both journalism and fiction. A different way to get under the skin of a community, but artistically assess what it all meant and why it mattered.
Stories don’t have to be one thing. Because places are never just one thing. My home contains, yes, working-class and middle-class people, those with connections to the pits and those with none, those on the left and on the right, Leave voters and Remain, as complex and human and inconsistent as anyone else, anywhere else, and it’s been my privilege and pleasure to give them a voice.
Having spent most of my writing life imagining myself into the heads of politicians and public figures, I’m not used to feeling caught out by a trembling of the lip as I type, or a clandestine wipe of a tear in the darkness of an edit suite as the cuts are put together. Maybe this is all just because it feels so close to me — geographically and emotionally. This is not my pain, it’s those of the people whom this story is really about, and for. But home will do funny things to us all.
Sherwood starts on BBC1 on June 13 at 9pm
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/james-graham-on-sherwood-bbc-one-q00v2b7c0