Transcript: Sherwood: A Conversation with James Graham and David Morrissey

July 21, 2024

MR. JORGENSON: Hello, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m Dave Jorgenson, senior video producer and TikTok guy here at The Post.

Today we're going to talk about the crime series, "Sherwood." Joining me now are the show's creator, James Graham, and lead actor, David Morrissey.

James and David, welcome to Washington Post Live.

MR. GRAHAM: Hi. How are you doing?

MR. MORRISSEY: Hello.

MR. JORGENSON: Thanks for joining me.

So a quick note to our audience before we get started, we want to hear from you. So, if you have any questions for our guests, please tweet us at the handle @PostLive. That's @PostLive, at P‑o‑s‑t‑L‑‑i‑v‑e.

Okay. Let's get started. James, this series has been a hit in the UK this summer, and now it's debuted in the U.S. on the streaming service, BritBox. It's basically everywhere at this point, but it takes place in a very small place, a mining village where you grew up. Can you tell me more about the true events that inspired "Sherwood" and why now is the right moment to tell this story?

MR. GRAHAM: Yeah, sure. Nice to speak about it. Yes. So it's set in my hometown in North Nottinghamshire, which is a socially, economically deprived part of England. It's where, you know, industry and manufacture used to play a key part in people's lives but since then has deteriorated due to the various government policies over the years.

And, as many people will know, in 1984, there was a huge‑‑Britain's largest, actually, piece of industrial action, the largest strike ever in the UK, which was the miners' strike, which was against the policies of Margaret Thatcher closing down the state‑subsidized pits and collieries, and you may have seen that represented culturally in films like "Billy Elliot" and that kind of thing. But, actually, what's the untold story, I think, of this is it was more split than you might imagine, and in my hometown in Nottinghamshire, more people stayed working than actually went on strike. And pre‑Brexit, pre the European referendum where we were all divided into this artificial binary of leave and remain, this decision completely split families and friendship groups. It was incredibly violent, and the London Metropolitan Police had to come up for about a year and police these communities, and it was very upsetting.

Cut to 2004, and there was a really tragic murder on my uncle's street, a few downs down from me, where a miner who had been on strike was killed by a miner who had chosen to go back to work, and this‑‑it was done with a crossbow, a bow and arrow, so all the mythology and the folklore around Robin Hood being an outlaw with a bow and arrow was all‑‑is all there. He went into Sherwood Forest, and because that search area was so huge, the Met Police had to come back to this very tiny village decades after the miners' strike. And what that did was invoke all those memories that that shared trauma in their community around that political decision that split it in the first place. So it's a crime drama that we're representing, but it's the political and social narratives that I think interested me the most.

MR. JORGENSON: Yeah. And something else you talked about in an interview regarding the show is how people, even decades later, if they saw someone, they'd cross the street if that person was on the other side of the strike. So that was fascinating to me. We're going to get more into that later.

But, David, I want to talk about your role as Detective‑‑Chief Superintendent Ian St Clair, not to be confused Sinclair. He's leading the murder investigation, and we have a clip of him talking about the town's relationship with the police. So let's take a look at that first.

[Video plays]

MR. JORGENSON: David, one thing I appreciate about your character in this scene is sort of a self‑awareness of the tension towards the police. Can you talk a little bit about more where that stems from?

MR. MORRISSEY: Yeah. Well, not long before our drama started, Nottingham was in a particularly violent phase of its history. There was‑‑it was actually‑‑the nickname for it was "Shottingham" because there was a lot of gun crime.

And that scene there is Ian has been rewarded for the work he's done on that particular investigation, but he's very aware because he's a man from those streets. He hasn't been drafted in, in any way. He grew up in that community. He's a man very aware of the history of those streets, the history of those communities. His father was a miner himself. So he grew up in a mining community and chose a different path. He chose the police as‑‑and so did his brother.

So, you know, he's very alive to the history of what goes on and also the police's responsibility to the community themselves. You know, obviously modern policing entails a lot of sort of online crime now, and, you know, there's a lot of times when they're not on the beats, they're not in the communities themselves. But he believes in the contract, in the public contract that the police govern by consent of the people, that they're there for those people, not to be against them but to be for them. And he wants to place him and his own police force right in the heart of his local community. He believes in that very strongly, and then this terrible crime happens, as James was just describing. And Ian is very, very conscious that this could really open up a lot of old wounds in that community, and that those old wounds could spiral to a much larger conflict amongst the people who live in those streets.

MR. JORGENSON: Let's get deeper into those wounds. James, I want to talk about the miners. A term as perhaps an ignorant American, I was not as familiar with a "scab" when I was watching that. I had to play it back to see what a scab was. Can you explain to me the issues between the scabs and the strikers and the history there?

MR. GRAHAM: Yeah. I think‑‑I don't think you're alone there, actually. I think certainly even the younger generation in the UK have never even heard of that, that terminology before, but it was certainly widely used in the 1980s, and it was to determine those people who decided to go back to work, dissent from the union and cross a picket line. And that picket line was a real physical thing. So those miners who were striking‑‑and I think you have to remember that in the UK in 1980s, that was about‑‑it was several hundred thousand people who worked in the coal industry at that time.

And so these were, you know, tens and tens of thousands of people picketing every single day across the UK, tried to stop workers going into the pits, and that often meant that sometimes you would find yourself opposite your dad or your brother or your old friend, and they had chosen to go to work and you had chosen to stay out. And, if you chose to stay out, that was‑‑you know, that went on for about a year. You had no wage. You had no salary. You were completely economically devastated. So the resentment that I think built up to those who made the choice to continue working was very profound, and as you said at the very beginning, that still‑‑to my shock as someone who just turned 40, to my shock, people in my community still won't speak to people who made a different choice back in '84, different part of the pub you sit in, cross the street if you see them.

And so, as David described, you can imagine the fear that the police had when a murder happened within a community like this where there is such a difficult relationship to the police, and we could talk about that more if you like because I do think that speaks to the existential crisis that both your nation and our nation currently has with its police force over what that contract is. It was‑‑the potential for flare‑ups was huge, and it's how David's character, Ian, and the rest of them navigated their way through the tension.

So, for me, again, as a writer, it wasn't just about doing a procedural crime drama or even a thriller, and there are all those thriller elements in it. You have a guy, an armed killer in the woods who is tormenting and torturing a community and you have more than one killing, it should be said. But, to me, yes, it was all the stuff you're talking about, about the relationship to institutions and power in the police.

MR. JORGENSON: Yeah. And one thing that I appreciate right at the beginning of the very first episode and throughout is there is just a sense of history. We're not getting all the information just yet, but there's little pieces that you're clearly showing some tension amongst the characters that start to unravel as we learn more and more about them.

And my producer tells me that I need to learn my history more because, apparently, it's a young American thing as well, and that older Americans probably are more aware of "scab."

MR. GRAHAM: Right.

MR. JORGENSON: So I'll do my little history lesson after this.

Now, I do‑‑let's talk, as you said, more about the police officers in this. David, I read that you met the actual officer who investigated the Sherwood murders. How did exploring the miners' stroke from a police officer's perspective inform your preparation to play Ian St Clair?

MR. MORRISSEY: Yes, I did. I met the officer who was in charge of this investigation. I met lots of police officers, actually. I met police officers who were still‑serving police officers and officers who have now left the force, and that was quite interesting, the difference between their memories of what went on.

But, also, I met a lot of miners. I met a lot of miners who had been there during the strike and their opinion of the police, and there seems to me to be, you know, an understanding of all sides about how difficult it was. What happened was‑‑and I think James alluded to it‑‑was that there was policemen from the community, people like Ian, who he would know the people on the other side of that picket line. He would have grown up with them. He knew them from school. He knew them from the streets he grew up in. So there was a‑‑although it wasn't peaceful, you know, there would be skirmishes, but they knew each other, and it wasn't unheard of that they would stand on the picket line in the day but then go to the pub with the same people in the evening.

The difference was that it became such a difficult thing to police and a manpower problem that police forces were drafted in from other parts of the UK, particularly from London and the Metropolitan Police who had no relationship with the people on the other side. And they were also given an arraignment by the government at the time to go in, to, you know, go in there heavy‑handed, and so that's where a lot of the lasting scars, lasting schisms came from was the brutality that happened when other police forces came into that region.

And Ian in our present‑day story is told that officers are going to have to come into that region again, and that's where his panic and his real concern starts to grow when he knows that other police forces are going to have to come into this region and police it. And he finds that really dangerous, given the history of what happened during those times.

MR. JORGENSON: Yeah. And, you know, difficult for that character, for police officers, and I think for James, speaking of difficulty, I feel like creating this show and it's inspired by true events, but they're not quite exactly what happened, of course. So can you tell me more about the responsibility there and the difficulty of making the show but, again, not fully based on the true events?

MR. GRAHAM: Yeah. I mean, it was difficult, but then it should be difficult because it's not my personal tragedy, and this is real people's trauma. So, yeah, I made the decision, having spoken to some of the real people involved, including the police officers that David spoke to and the family who are inspired by the first killing of the striking miner, their father, it felt‑‑I've done a lot of real‑life stories and put real people on the stage and screen, including things like "The Crown" where you're dealing with the queen and, you know, very familiar people. But because these are private individuals and their tragedy felt quite private and because I was a neighbor‑‑this is my‑‑this is my town, my family. I can't actually imagine‑‑maybe you know one, but I can't imagine other examples where the writer of a true crime story was in the village at the time and lived a few streets away.

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MR. JORGENSON: I can't think of one. [Laughs]

MR. GRAHAM: So I felt that very keenly.

So the choice actually‑‑I know‑‑well, I'm actually making it sound too worthy because, obviously, the other choice you have to make as a creator is that you also do want the freedom to investigate all the things that really interested me. So I wanted to manufacture‑‑as David mentioned, I wanted to manufacture a police relationship between a police detective and his father, who was a miner, and the shame that he feels over having picked a different path and that being drawn up by this crime.

You want the freedom to get to a different kind of truth and also not hurt, and no one goes into this to hurt or cause pain. I didn't want to cause extra pain to the people who were involved. So we took the core essence of this story, multiple killings in a mining community, where there was divisions, and the re‑arrival decades later of the Metropolitan Police, like David said, created danger there‑‑that's the kernel of it‑‑and outlaws in Sherwood Forest who were armed and dangerous. And the rest was, yeah, these are my characters. These are my families. I've invented them in order to explore the issues and the themes that I wanted to do and to distance it from the real people who I grew to care about and wanted them to not be too retraumatized by it.

MR. JORGENSON: And part of that exploration is the different perspectives, I think, of all‑‑so, you know, critics have talked about‑‑and they praised that you‑‑we see the miners, the police, and even the killers. That's‑‑they're all blending together in a certain way. How did you decide to do that? Was that part of‑‑I don't know‑‑to elaborate on the truth, or can you tell me a little bit more about that and your decision to blend these story lines?

MR. GRAHAM: I just think that's the main‑‑that's the super power of drama. It's unlike‑‑no disrespect to journalism or any other trade that tries to interrogate what the hell is happening in the world. The value, I think, always of drama, whether on stage or screen, is empathy. It literally forces an audience to walk in the shoes or the footsteps of someone you might politically disagree with, and in both our cultures at the moment, we are living through incredibly polarized and extreme times. And this was almost like a microcosm of that in 1984 with the miners' strike and then what happened in these murders decades later.

In one little community, you have these polarized extremes, these factions and divides, which acts as a kind of, I guess, metaphor for everything that's happening and in the West at the moment in terms of our inability to meet each other or agree with each other or listen and to hear each other's points of view and some [unclear] because the people‑‑this was people's lives, and it was very, very painful.

So I guess I am conscious as a writer of trying to humanize all points of view and not just in a sit‑on‑the‑fence, centrist way. I just think that's the value of it, and actually, you know, the joy of it is how complicated and messy and difficult this stuff is and the condition and that these characters were placed in. And it actually also felt like a privilege. I don't‑‑to put‑‑to give voice to the infinitely more difficult argument of those who went back to work.

I don't know what it's like over there, but certainly, in our culture‑‑and, David, I'm sure you agree‑‑that there is just less understanding or familiarity with the arguments for the tens of thousands of miners who chose to work and didn't stay out, and, you know, the romance of striking is easily understood and the pain of striking is easily understood. You're denying yourself something for a greater cause. I think just to find the language for those people that made a different decision, which was the majority of people in my village, felt great, and then looking to all the stuff about masculinity and shame and how much of our working-class identity is based on our politics or our job or our ability to provide for our families and all that stuff. So, yeah, that all fell in there.

MR. JORGENSON: Yeah. And that self‑awareness too is in there, I think. There's even a line from David's character about let's not call this the Robin Hood. Let's not give the media something to peg this to. And I appreciated that sort of, like, almost peek into the camera like, "No, this is not what this is about. We don't want it to become that," so that was a really interesting device within all that.

David, speaking more on your character, can you explain what spy cops are and their legacy in Nottinghamshire?

MR. MORRISSEY: Yeah. So what happens during the course of our story is that Ian discovers that inside the community during that time, 1984, the government would have put in, I guess, you'd call undercover officers, people who were there to spy on the community, to also, you know, feed back information to the police and MI5, I guess. But, you know, they're police tactics that have often been used with organized crime, terrorist organizations, but this was amongst people who, you know, were either striking miners. They were‑‑they were people who had every right to their privacy. They were not agents against the state, and he discovers this in our present story.

But, also, what he discovers is that one of these spy cops‑‑and there were quite a few employed in that operation, but one of them may or may not have stayed in the community. And so he has to now look at the community in a different way because he believes that someone who would have been sending information back during that time and actually, probably, you know, creating more division or helping to create more division in that community is still around. And he believes that our killer knows that information, and so there could be an imminent target for this man's‑‑you know, for his murderous intent, and so he's suddenly got a timeclock on him that he's got to find this person. But he's also got personal reasons to find him as well.

What I love about James's work is it is‑‑you know, there's the political and the bit with the big capital P, but there's political with the personal politics as well that people are going through their personal fights and politicism that is happening right in front of them. And it's important that, you know, instead of having the condemnation of a sound bite which happens‑‑seems to be happening a lot in our world, that we see the complexity and understand the difficulties and the reasons for people making their decisions in their life, whether it's to feed their family or whether it's to protect themselves or whatever. But, you know, it's listening and understanding with comprehension rather than just the sound bite that we tend to get now.

MR. JORGENSON: Well, you know, I think there's also some acting with a capital A from you, and speaking of listening, when I was watching your character, there is so much going on and especially in that first episode that you're clearly taking it all in. And we kind of just‑‑there's just a lot of shots of you just looking, and there's so much going on. Can you tell me about the process of building this character and his world and how‑‑what you were thinking about in those scenes to help kind of, you know, get the audience behind this police officer?

MR. MORRISSEY: Well, first and foremost, it always starts with the script. I mean, you know, you think of the script as just the lines on the page, but it's also the bits within the lines as well. So, you know, you work on what James has given you, and it was such gold.

But, also, our two directors, we had Lewis Arnold and Ben A. Williams, who are our directors. You would talk to them, but then, also, what I would do is I would meet people from that time. I would meet a lot of people who lived there.

I grew up in the north of England. I grew up in Liverpool. So my city, it was a very binary argument. We were very for the miners and against Thatcher. Whereas, the drama that James has written is a much more nuanced world. It was a world I was not aware of. Like you, I was not‑‑I did not really comprehend what it must have been like for miners who went back to work, who stayed in work. I hadn't‑‑that had never been on my radar.

So I had to go and discover that, and Ian is a character who carries a lot of community history and the history of his country, but he carries a lot of personal history. So things that might mean something just in pure terms of the investigation, he's also thinking of them in terms of his own personal development, his own life, the decisions he's made in his life. And what this present‑day story is uncovering is making him examine his own life every minute because he's walking the streets that he grew up as a kid, the streets he grazed his knee on as a kid, the streets he played football in, you know. He's looking at it through those‑‑that child's eyes and remembering what it was like and what he's lost and sacrificed during that time because of the events that he's having to reexamine now. So it's very loaded stuff.

MR. JORGENSON: It is loaded, and speaking of loaded and things that James has written‑‑he wrote a great script‑‑James, you also wrote an op‑ed for The Guardian, and you said you wrote "Sherwood" as a warning. I know we were kind of already talking about the polarization and everything a few minutes ago, but what did you mean by this being a warning?

MR. GRAHAM: I think, essentially, what‑‑without reducing all the complexities, as David discusses, of what the miners' strike was on a very human level‑‑and actually, as you sort of intimated‑‑the drama doesn't really take any viewpoint on even the economic rightness or wrongness of the Thatcher government employing the policies of a time that were very much happening under Reagan as well of reducing the state and closing loss making industries that employed hundreds of thousands of people. I suppose the one stand it does take is whoever was to blame or whatever the right or wrong decisions behind that policy were, the victims were people from across the country in places like my community, and what was unforgivable was the way that they were abandoned and left behind without any investment.

And then the more I got into it, the more talking, as David did, about spy cops and the ways in which the police and the security services and the government intentionally inserted agent provocateurs almost and divisive elements into these communities in order to split them, because if there was the splitting of them, that would mean that the government would win and that the unions would lose. I found that so upsetting and compelling, a new‑‑actually, a new way of looking at it, but that's wasn't your question. Sorry. I went off on a tangent. Your question about the polarization. Yeah.

MR. JORGENSON: That's fine. It was a good tangent.

[Laughter]

MR. GRAHAM: Yeah. I went‑‑but, yes, polarization. I think‑‑I would‑‑you know, you'll know infinitely more than I will about what is happening today in our political discourse‑‑

MR. JORGENSON: Sure.

MR. GRAHAM: ‑‑in the U.S. and the UK and how there will always be natural differences of opinion on social, political, economic, cultural questions.

What I find, again, unforgiving and worrying and frustrating is the way that different parties or governments will weaponize those divisions and exacerbate them for short‑term political gain, whether that's dividing us into these groups of concern and saying you should be blaming them and you should be blaming them. So the multitude of strikes that have reemerged in the UK over the past few months, which I sometimes worry that me and David and our drama manifested by just talking about them again‑‑

MR. JORGENSON: I don't think that's on you all.

[Laughter]

MR. GRAHAM: I'd say so great for it, but yeah, things are happening, and we have the rail strikers and barristers. It's not just a working class thing. It's middle‑class professionals and possibly the biggest nurse strike in the NHS that might take place over the winter. So a mood, a philosophy, an attitude, a spirit is being reawakened.

But, yes, I fundamentally think that what unites the UK and the U.S. is the‑‑is the shameful, sometimes, decision by governing parties to see tensions, see divisions, and go right into the heart of it and exacerbate those and whether or not people believe or don't believe that Joe Biden is sincere when he says he wants to be a unifying force, that is why I think we all need, whether it's effective or not‑‑I think, you know, it's much harder to choose to unite people than it is to divide us into categories and have us fighting amongst ourselves.

MR. JORGENSON: Well, I'm curious too if you'll explore these themes more because you just got renewed for a second season. Congratulations.

MR. GRAHAM: Thank you.

MR. JORGENSON: And, well, I'm curious, one, will that exist in the similar world? Will David be there? Will you look more into this polarization? What's going on there?

MR. GRAHAM: Yeah. Well, David and I spoke a few weeks ago about what‑‑and David isn't giving himself anywhere near enough credit for how much he himself sort of loaded, as you said, the character and the world with some of these stories.

We both come from working theater a lot, and I think that collaborative nature of building a world and the characters is why I really love and value as a dramatist as opposed to a novelist working with human beings. So, yeah, both David and I have been speaking about the potentials for what that second series might be, without having rights or the answers yet.

But, unfortunately, as you may have noticed, it is not a quiet time politically in Britain at the moment, and there is plenty to talk about, and I suppose what I'm interested in is the vulnerabilities, where we are vulnerable as a society for those tensions and divisions that we saw in the 1980s to reemerge. And I'm convinced it's around the area of economic deprivation and poverty, which is coming down the tracks very urgently certainly in the UK over energy, price bills, and the cutting of the states and welfare and everything else. So crime and the combustibility that comes with crime may return to Nottinghamshire like the bad old days, and I think somewhere in that will be a story for our characters.

MR. JORGENSON: Well, I look forward to it, and, David, with that return to Nottinghamshire, what do you want your character to do? How would you like him to develop? Do you have any personal thoughts that you want to put out into the world? You can manifest right here in front of the show creator. Maybe he'll make them happen.

[Laughter]

MR. MORRISSEY: Yeah. I mean, one of the things I loved about Ian was that‑‑and it's not always an easy thing to play, but that he's got really good intentions. He is essentially a good man. He might make mistakes. He might make terrible mistakes. He might do things which he feels are for the best interest, but essentially, he's a good man.

I think not in terms of a religious way, but, you know, he has good‑‑he has good Christian values, if you want. You know, he does put himself‑‑he has empathetic values. He puts himself in the shoes of other people, and I think that is part of one of the things that I feel is quite lacking at the moment is the idea of ourselves as a humanity that has values that are empathetic about what must it be like for those other people to look at how other people are living their life and struggling in their life and have our ears open and our hearts open to that as opposed to the fear that we're given. And we're governed by fear. That closes our hearts and closes our ears and our minds to other people's plights.

MR. JORGENSON: That's beautiful. My heart is open to everything you just said, though my clock is now saying we can't‑‑we can't talk about it anymore.

[Laughter]

MR. JORGENSON: So, James Graham, David Morrissey, thank you both for joining us. I really appreciate it.

MR. GRAHAM: Cheers. Thank you.

MR. MORRISSEY: Thank you.

MR. JORGENSON: Thank you.

And thanks to all of you for tuning in today at Post Live. To check out what interviews we have coming up, head to WashingtonPostLive.com to find more.

I'm Dave Jorgenson, and thank you for joining us at Washington Post Live.

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