There’s a hell of a lot going on in the return of Sherwood (BBC One). Its first episode alone contains a cold-blooded murder, a drive-by shooting, a sulphuric altercation in court and an art-defacing protest against fossil fuels. Viewers watching the plot as it jumps up and down may feel like that cameraman who filmed the trampolining at the Olympics.
Famous for his restless productivity, scriptwriter James Graham has never previously had time or perhaps inclination to revisit old ground. The risk, as he returns to his patch of Nottinghamshire, is of difficult second album syndrome.
The first series fictionalised two unconnected murders that reignited tensions in a community long riven by the miners’ strike. The thought experiment underpinning the new plot is that the coal industry could return to this bit of the Red Wall, promising jobs but also a bigger hole in the ozone layer. Though presumably inspired by a similar controversy in Cumbria, one spectacular gain with this ploit point is the chance to shoot a scene inside the cooling tower of a power station.
Meanwhile, the county’s crime wave moves centre stage. Hence all those shootings. After the crossbow killer in the first series, in Ryan Bottomley (a skulking, showstopping Oliver Huntingdon) we meet another savage embodiment of post-industrial Britain’s left-behind.
To tell an expansive new set of interlinking stories about coal-mining and drug-dealing, the plot has recruited a big battalion of heavy hitters. Robert Lindsay and David Harewood will have more to do in later episodes. Most eye-catching and indeed marrow-chilling in this one is Monica Dolan as frosty criminal leaderene Ann Branson.
Her arrival, following the murder of her son Nicky, surely bodes very ill for Daphne Sparrow (Lorraine Ashbourne), whose secret past as an undercover policewoman is an unexploded powderkeg. “What you gonna put with that, Daphne, veg wise?” Ann asked, eyeing a chicken, on a visit. Dolan’s not in mumsy mode here. Never has an innocent question about a lunch menu been packed with so much veiled threat.
The episode’s heavy-lifting script dishes out info as breathlessly as a speed-dater, establishing themes, reintroducing old characters in new clothes, and crowbarring in Robin Hood references. The new Sheriff of Nottingham, unlike her dastardly medieval predecessor, is a young mum married to another young mum. Sherwood is not as it was, but Graham’s aim is still true.