If Ken Loach and Quentin Tarantino ever got together to collaborate the chances are they’d come up with something akin to Sherwood (BBC One) which, as it reached the penultimate episode of an enthralling, if not always entirely convincing, second run, continued its merry mash-up of political grandstanding and clan-mob violence with gritty aplomb.
One minute you get David Morrissey’s reluctant copper, Ian St Clair, using a police press conference as a rallying cry for social action, then it’s over to the blood feud between the Bransons and the Sparras (Sparrows to non-Nottinghamshire natives) where, at current mortality rates, it’s unlikely that anyone will get out of there alive.
It makes for an uneasy mix, but perhaps that’s the point. St Clair’s impassioned state of the nation address (“We have lost control, if we don’t admit that we’ll never get it back”) felt eerily timely given the shockwaves from the recent rioting that has rocked British cities.
Losing control here means the likes of Ann Branson (Monica Dolan in truly terrifying form) taking the law into her own hands and giving it a good throttling. There are many plates spinning and writer James Graham doesn’t quite keep them all in the air.
Throwing in a paternity twist courtesy of Robert Lindsay’s self-made millionaire businessman felt like it had been filched out of the EastEnders waste bin, while the police procedural elements – the discovery of a vital piece of evidence stretched credibility until it all but snapped – gave this house of cards a mighty wobble. But when it comes down to the human emotions caught up in Sherwood’s thicket of storylines, Graham plays to his strengths.
There’s a whole lifetime of anguish in Lorraine Ashbourne’s riveting portrayal of one-time undercover cop Daphne (not her real name) Sparrow, a woman who is a moral maze unto herself. “It never ends, does it,” she snaps at the latest twist of cruel fate. One episode to go Daphne, you might just make it yet.