The Sherwood Foresters

I've just finished watching Sherwood, the BBC drama set in a former Nottinghamshire pit village still split by the 1984-85 miners' strike, at the edge of the eponymous forest into which a young bow and arrow-wielding murderer flees (Robin Hood isn't the only literary reference - the Metropolitan Police spies sent into the coalfield at the start of the strike with the identities of dead children assume codenames of Romantic poets including Keats, Wordsworth and Byron, who lived nearby at Newstead Abbey, where the investigators meet the National Union of Mineworkers' lawyer to discuss their undercover operations).

The plot combines a crime drama based on two real, but unconnected, killings in the same area, revealing the identity of the murderers from the start and focussing more on their motivations, with a slower uncovering of secrets in the backgrounds and personal lives of the police and petty criminal characters.

The series sketches some of the background to the bitterness, with flashbacks to the 1984-85 strike when Nottinghamshire's pits and a big majority of its thirty thousand miners worked throughout the year long dispute as flying pickets from Yorkshire to the north clashed with police dispatched to confront them from the south. Although the Nottinghamshire Area of the NUM had always been on the right of the union, and split from it at the end of the strike (as it had after the 1926 General Strike), their ostensible reason for not joining the strike (the failure to call a national ballot) was always a pretty threadbare excuse, with thick seams of coal, modern mines and good wages meaning that they felt safe from the closure programme which would decimate the industry elsewhere in the country by the late 80s (they weren't: in 1992, the Tory government, which had lauded them as heroes in 1984-85 and promised them jobs for life, turned on them and shut their pits down too).

There are a couple of nice beer references: the NUM stalwart and murder victim who orders a pint of mix (mild and bitter) and the leader of the striking Yorkshire miners who bemoans the lack of Tetley's in the local club when they come down on a coach for his memorial.