Sherwood season 2 was less than the sum of its many moving parts

Ever since BBC4 was turned into an archive channel in 2022, it’s been opening a weekly window every Wednesday night on to classic dramas of the past, most of them made between the 70s and the 90s.

The series and single plays – an all but defunct format these days –repeated so far include Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective, Brimstone and Treacle and Blue Remembered Hills; Jack Rosenthal’s Eskimo Day and ( just last Wednesday) The Evacuees; Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff; Graham Reid’s Billy trilogy, which launched the career of a young Belfast actor called Kenneth Branagh; Arthur Hopcraft’s masterly adaptations of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and, seven years later, A Perfect Spy; the original House of Cards by Michael Dobbs; Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit; Troy Kennedy Martin’s Edge of Darkness, and Peter Flannery’s epic Our Friends in the North, which gave Daniel Craig his breakthrough role and at the time (1995) was the most expensive drama series the BBC had ever produced.

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For those of us who remember watching these the first time around, it’s easy to fall into the trap of viewing the past through rosetinted glasses. There was no shortage of rubbish dramas and comedies being made back then too.

Nonetheless, the above list – and it’s just a sample, remember – gives an indication of the astonishing variety and ambition of drama being made by the BBC on an almost routine basis during those decades.

What’s more, many were shown in prime-time slots on mainstream BBC1, where they drew large audiences. So much for the idea that a mass audience can’t appreciate challenging drama that requires it to think.

Which brings us to Sherwood (BBC1, Sunday & Monday, September 8 & 9), which I suppose is the modern equivalent of those big BBC drama series that captivated millions of viewers. But – and this is probably a minority opinion – it’s also illustrates how British television drama’s ambitions seem to have slowly, stealthily narrowed over time.

That’s not to say it’s not engrossing, entertaining television. Quite the opposite. The first season of James Graham’s series, loosely inspired by real events, about murders in a former mining village in Nottinghamshire where the painful wounds of the miners’ strike in the 80s, which tore the community and even families apart, continue to fester, gripped both viewers and critics, who regarded it as one of the finest dramas of 2022.

It’s debatable whether Sherwood even needed a second season.

Personally, I came away from the final two episodes – which I won’t be ruining with any spoilers – feeling it might have been better to leave things as they were.

Season one felt like a state-of-the-nation drama about a section of society that’s been left behind to nurse the bruises of the past. Season two, however, leaned more towards being a straightforward gangland thriller of the type we’ve arguably seen enough of already.

The story was less about the simmering tensions in the wider community than about the simmering tensions between two criminal clans.

One we knew already: the Sparrows, led by matriarch and former undercover police informant Daphne (the terrific Lorraine Ashbourne) and husband Mickey (Philip Jackson).

They found themselves up against Ann and Roy Branson – a next-level nasty couple, brilliantly played by new cast members Monica Dolan and Stephen Dillane – who descended on the village, looking for answers and blood, after their son was shot dead.

The season was dominated by this strand and, to be fair, it was nail-bitingly tense stuff, if not always entirely believable. The downside was that what looked like it might be the bigger story, the plan by smarmy, shady businessman Franklin Warner (Robert Lindsay in full moustachetwirling mode) to reopen the mine and the implications for an already fractured community, never seemed to get out of first gear.

For all the outstanding performances from returning cast members such as David Morrissey and Lesley Manville (underused this time), and new additions such as David Harewood, Michael Balogun and Oliver Huntingdon (a newcomer to watch), Sherwood season two felt like less than the sum of its many moving parts.

‘It leaned more towards being a straightforward gangland thriller’