Television doesn’t pay much attention to villages like Ashfield, the working-class community in Nottinghamshire where playwright James Graham grew up. It wasn’t picturesque; it wasn’t gritty or vibrant like Manchester; it was just overlooked. Even in 2004, when one of the villagers murdered someone with a crossbow, then went into hiding in nearby Sherwood Forest like a modern-day Robin Hood – and was consequently pursued in one of the biggest manhunts in British policing history – the story barely made it into the national press.

“It’s interesting; some real-life tragedies seep into the public consciousness more than others,” says Graham. “This, for some reason, hadn’t.” For a writer, however, it was a story with irresistible resonances. Sherwood, a six-part series written by Graham for the BBC, weaves elements of the real-life case into a story of a community still divided into factions that fought during the 1984 miners’ strike.

By switching between time frames, Graham finds links and echoes between these events – separated by 30 years – while implicitly throwing forward to that community’s most recent family-splitting schism, the Brexit referendum. “There is a great tradition in theatre, which is my background, of finding an equivalence in the recent past to make sense of the present,” he says. “I think those comparisons are all there for people to see.”

In Sherwood, screenwriter James Graham weaves elements of the real-life case of a villager murdered by a crossbow into a story of a community still divided into factions that fought during the 1984 miners’ strike.Credit:Matt Squire

For the characters, however, these rifts are personal. While the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) held out across the country for almost a year, many of the Nottingham pit workers broke away to form a new union and returned to work. Gary Jackson (Alun Armstrong) is a former NUM stalwart who regularly harangues his neighbour Dean (Sean Gilder) in the working men’s club for crossing the 1984 picket line: a punch-up is always in the offing. Gary’s wife Julie (Lesley Manville) fell out with her sister decades ago and hasn’t spoken to her since. She only lives next door.

This is the crux of the matter: nobody forgets anything. When a man is murdered – in broad daylight, with a crossbow – the first assumption is that this is long-delayed political payback. Then other social fissures come to light. A local crime family with plenty to hide comes under renewed police surveillance. Another crack splits wide open between the gentle Andy (Adeel Akhtar), a railway worker and Labour stalwart, and his newly married son Neel (Bally Gill), whose snippy wife Sarah (Joanne Froggatt) is the Tory council candidate. Meanwhile, the local police find that records of the 1984 picket line arrests have mysteriously gone missing.

Graham was only two during the strike but, like everyone else, he lived with its residue of bitterness. When police were sent up from London to help find the crossbow murderer, he perceived a palpable tension among people who had last seen the Met police at the pit gates. Unlike the locals, the London police weren’t confronting their own brothers or schoolmates across the picket lines; they were brutal. “I remember being surprised how emotional the older generation were to see those police marching back into their streets,” Graham said in an interview with the Radio Times. “The sense of them feeling trapped by their own history: I felt very moved by that.”

David Morrissey, Lesley Manville and Robert Glenister in Sherwood. “I went on the marches. We were a hundred per cent behind the NUM,” says Morrissey of his personal involvement in the 1984 miners’ strike. Credit:Matt Squire

Over the weeks Sherwood screened in Britain, many former activists contacted him to say that he had underplayed the role of the so-called “spy police” who infiltrated local communities, posing as miners and acting as agents provocateurs: illegal tactics that are currently the subject of a long-delayed public inquiry into undercover policing. “This is the joy of finally sharing something,” he says. “People write to you. I have a new reading pile of books and papers. In the second series – and I’m pleased to say there will be one – that is definitely something that will be unpicked.”

Actor David Morrissey plays the local chief of police, trying to keep the murder investigation sufficiently low-key not to rekindle the fire of battle that has smouldered under the surface of daily life for so long. Morrissey grew up in Liverpool. There were no coal pits there; instead there were the docks and shipyards, which were even more militant Labour strongholds.

“For me growing up, it was a very binary fight,” he says. “I wore a badge saying ‘Coal, not Dole’; I went on the marches. We were a hundred per cent behind the NUM.” Working on the series, reading recently declassified police documents, confirmed his conviction that the conflict was orchestrated as part of a bigger project. “That particular government needed to break the unions to carry out their plan for what they wanted Britain to look like in the future. And here we are, in the future.”

Sherwood writer James Graham.

Graham says he worried that this political history might put off viewers. “I’ll be honest: the director Lewis Arnold and I had constant late-night existential conversations about the balance between a crime thriller – the entertainment element – and the social and political elements,” he says. “But from what we can gather, it’s the history and politics that British people really warmed to.” Sherwood has been the sort of talking-point television that was supposed to have died at the hands of the streaming services.

That said, he wasn’t interested in writing a political tract; one result of growing up in a divided community, he thinks, is that he is inclined to see all sides at once. “I really genuinely hope Sherwood doesn’t come down too hard on what’s better, left or right, all that,” he says. “It’s really about the human cost of those policies. And I think nobody, whether you agree with the closing of the mines or not, could disagree about that or the cost of neglecting hundreds of thousands of people whose industry was taken away.”

Leslie Manville and Claire Rushbrook in Sherwood. James Graham says he wasn’t interested in writing a political tract; “It’s really about the human cost of those policies.”Credit:Matt Squire

That human cost was his beacon. Graham has written plays and television dramas about prime ministers, about press magnates, about Boris Johnson’s disgraced former adviser Dominic Cummings and about the famous cheat who foxed a TV quiz show. “I’ve spent a lot of time, and not necessarily fun time, in powerful people’s heads,” says Graham. “So to write a political drama in a place where there was no power, that would be about family tensions and broken friendships in the sorts of houses and gardens the audience would recognise, was joyful.”

The local reaction has also been overwhelmingly positive, despite some resistance to raking over the details of the real murders. Graham’s mother has been taking soundings in the village shop, where she used to work, of local reactions. There were niggles.“The main grievance,” he says wryly, “was that we didn’t film enough in Nottinghamshire.” He laughs ruefully. “But I can live with that.”

Sherwood is on BBC First, Wednesday, 8.30pm.

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