Sherwood creator James Graham on class, Gareth Southgate and Britain’s ‘f**kload of problems’

James Graham is trying to sum up the times we are living in. It’s what he does, very successfully, in his work for stage and screen. And as Sherwood‘s second series continues on BBC One, he is considering how it will be viewed following the recent riots and change of government. 

“I hadn’t thought about how the riots would impact the frame through which people view it,” he says. “But it’s that anger and frayed social fabric again, like we had in series one of Sherwood.  

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“No one is excusing that behaviour, but the sense of disenfranchisement and disillusionment among the population, and how that sometimes manifests itself in quite unseen ways. Social isolation, loneliness – despairing and purposeless – sometimes that explodes into the street.” 

Being James Graham, he is also thinking about how he would write about this moment. 

“When these lads are throwing bricks at police on the streets of Liverpool, but you’ve also got Elon Musk tweeting from Silicon Valley his observations about British culture – that feels bizarre and frightening to me,” he says.  

“There are higher forces at play. Very powerful forces trying to tell a particular narrative about whole swathes of our society, which then reinforces and justifies certain behaviours. I don’t even know where to begin as a dramatist joining the line between that kid on the street and Silicon Valley. That feels overwhelming.”  

James Graham speaks quickly. Anyone wondering how he manages to be so prolific need only listen to him speak for an hour. The words fly out of his mouth, emerging in fully formed waves of ideas on class, masculinity, football, politics, community and culture. If he can type as fast as he talks, it’s less surprising that Graham can take on so many big projects.

The 42-year-old from Mansfield is on one of those artistic hot streaks. If earlier works explored the political machinations of this country – Coalition and Brexit: The Uncivil War, as well as one of the best episodes of The Crown (young Prince Charles tries to learn Welsh from firebrand lecturer) for TV, Labour of Love and This House on stage – Graham has shifted towards class and community. 

As David Morrissey, collaborator and lead actor on Sherwood, said recently: “There’s not an actor in Britain that wouldn’t kill another actor to get their hands on a James Graham script.” 

The first series of Sherwood shone a light on how the miners’ strike, its policing and the subsequent political neglect of the villages of Graham’s native Nottinghamshire left echoes of pain and poverty that still resonate. It was a depiction of a community, a police procedural, an examination of the spy cops scandal and a state-of-the-nation drama. 

“I remember lots of existential conversations with the director. Is it a hooky thriller or a state of the nation piece? Eventually we started to relax and not worry about it.”

Despite its success, few expected Sherwood to return. But Graham had found a rich seam of storytelling and was unwilling to shut it down. He had options: same police, different mystery; same town, different era – evolving Sherwood into an anthology about his home town; or dig deeper to expand the world of the show.  

Graham chose the latter, exploring how the people and place continue to try to move on from a difficult past.  

“I felt like there didn’t have to be any rules,” he says. “I could keep characters I felt had stories to tell but wasn’t obligated to return all the cast and generate false, ever-escalating crises in their lives. For some I thought, I’ve tested you enough, you can go now. 

“I tried to make it feel like a tense moment of transition. And, by accident or design, a few weeks into this new government and with the riots, it feels like a vulnerable, wobbly moment where a train has left a destination but not got to its next station. Those can be scary moments, as well as moments of opportunity and hope.” 

Sherwood continues to look at ruptures and divides, conflicts and neglect shaping working-class, post-industrial areas. Specifically, it now looks at the echoes of a crisis in Nottingham in the early 2000s, when the city was dubbed “Shottingham” after an unprecedented crime wave.  

“It had to still be about our industrial legacy and community, but also how the past is always in dialogue with the present,” he explains. “How we are sometimes imprisoned by our past. If the first series was about the legacy of the wounds of the miners’ strike, with this one I thought, let’s look at the impact on crime and the social fabric – even decades later – when you de-industrialise that community so quickly and aggressively. 

“I’ve always been confused about it. Why Nottingham? I was becoming an adult during this time. I remember the panic, the confusion about a series of killings of innocent people in the city centre. I wanted to capture that feeling of loss of control.  

“Speaking to police from the time when we were researching, one actually remembers a Cobra-type meeting of senior police officers from the East Midlands where they used that phrase. They had to admit, we lost control and don’t know how to get it back.” 

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This is personal for Graham. He doesn’t remember the miners’ strike, though he grew up in its aftermath. But he knows this place and these people. 

“If you’re setting a show or play, as I have done, in Westminster and it’s about ideology, that’s different,” he says. “But when it’s about community and how people’s lives are impacted by political and social inheritances, then no, it always feels personal.” 

One of the inheritances Graham draws in series two of Sherwood is of drug use – and associated gangs, guns, and violence in Nottingham. 

“I was so surprised, because I was slightly protected from this growing up, by the levels of drugs use in these pretty mining communities in the countryside. But you can draw a line.  

“If you take away people’s jobs and their work, despair and hopelessness follow. But there’s a bigger spiritual existential crisis. Mining communities were literally designed around pointing to one single thing. The streets lead to a thing that isn’t there any more – all the infrastructure was built around the mine, the social clubs, identity and heritage.  

“If that goes, something really deep goes with it. That’s literally a hole to fill in the ground, but also in people’s sense of themselves.” 

Class and regionality are always on Graham’s mind. When we meet, it’s just before his Mactaggart Lecture in Edinburgh. He’s nervous, and tests out a few ideas. He describes feeling a bit “icky” describing himself as working class, despite his background. Is he still writing Sherwood from within?

After all, Graham has just returned from New York where he is working with Elton John and Jake Shears before the Broadway debut of their musical Tammy Faye and spent last summer with one of his writing heroes, Alan Bleasdale, working on a stage version of Boys From The Blackstuff. In terms of playwrights and screenwriters, Graham is now as established as it gets. So, with the way class is talked about in this country, where does he fit in?

“Perpetually, and correctly, people are always going, ‘Where are all the working-class artists?’” he says. “But as soon as you become too successful, it’s like you have to lose your class status. You don’t lose your gayness or your blackness or your femininity or your faith. Why should you lose your class?  

“People are squeamish about class and don’t know how to identify it. If I’m not allowed to define myself as working class now, which is basically what the industry is saying, it means there can never be any working-class heroes.” 

Graham wants to change the story around class. Too much of the conversation recently, from simplistic narratives around the Red Wall during the 2019 election told by politicians and commentators with no connection to the region, to discussion around the recent racist riots has been, among much else, a failure of storytelling, he says.  

If one of the themes of Sherwood is change and the way we can be held back, sometimes by ourselves, is Graham able to extrapolate that into a wider sense of this country and the moment we’re in? Does he see people unwilling or unable to allow the country to evolve away from Rule Britannia and all that as a factor in the riots? 

“I think about this a lot,” he says. “There were so many factors in the last 10 years, but it has been a deeply disappointing decade. Regardless of your politics, no one can pretend it wasn’t a wasted decade of paralysis and stagnation. And in society, when nothing changes, things get worse. Because there are so many things to do.

“Part of that is a crisis of storytelling. There wasn’t a project or long-term mission. There was an inability to write a positive news story for what we want the country to be. Part of it is about accepting who we are now – the therapist in all of us says, unless you can do that, you’re never going to find happiness and authenticity.  

“Britain’s search for its new authentic self is causing a fuckload of problems. And that’s why I was obsessed by Gareth Southgate…” 

Graham is adapting Dear England, which examined Southgate’s project to rewrite the story of the England football team, for BBC One. 

“I have been living with [Southgate] in my head,” he grins. “Even I was surprised how moved I was when he resigned. It was like grieving.  

“I’ve only met him once. But he was as generous as you would imagine towards Dear England, a project he had great fear about. Maybe he took the England team as far as he could, but his project was an urgent and successful one in the sense of changing our relationship to the team. 

“And it was so quick, wasn’t it? In 2018, immediately, I was like, these guys are amazing. They’re so nice and they play so well, with such dignity and values you can relate to – and the flag doesn’t feel as frightening any more.” 

Graham returns to the theme of storytelling and Southgate’s early call for his players to write their own history.  

“He talked very early on about England needing a new story. He was talking through the prism of football, but I think he knew exactly what that meant in terms of the wider political and cultural resonance,” says Graham.  

“So he was talking about how we are all trapped by our story and how sometimes that manifests itself in strange ways, like being the worst at penalty shoot outs. Then Phil Foden would come out after a match saying we just tried to control the narrative. I love that. You are storytellers and you know you’re storytellers! 

“But Southgate also understood exactly what we are talking about here. I’m convinced he is the nation’s playwright.” 

Judging by Sherwood’s intertwining of big bold drama and cultural and political insight, Dear England’s smart distillation of the Southgate project, and how his new play Punch interrogates key issues around masculinity, male violence and forgiveness, James Graham’s ability to tell stories that capture the mood of the nation may mean he pips the former England manager to that title. And, whisper it, he might just be a working-class writing hero as well.

Sherwood airs on BBC One on Sunday and Monday nights.

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