This article is taken from the August/September 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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Strikes are back, and with them, memories of the mid-1980s and the miners’ stoppage. Today it’s the transport workers bringing the country to a halt. Mick Lynch, boss of the RMT union, is having a good class war, jousting effectively with his journalistic interrogators.

Yet, the ghosts of another era still hover. Who remembers SOGAT, the now-vanished print workers’ union, once 200,000-strong, that for years effectively ruled Fleet Street and the newspaper business? Or, for that matter, the National Union of Mineworkers?

The show’s two killings are really devices for exploring a much deeper, decades-old bitter divide

The left and much of the country united around the NUM as the miners fought to save their pits, their livelihoods and their communities. I can still see the yellow buckets for contributions (I might even have held one), hear the rattle of the coins inside and the long-ago calls for solidarity. Even now they echo through the decades and certainly through each episode of Sherwood, the fine BBC six-part drama that loops back and forth between the miners’ strike and the present-day.

Sherwood was inspired by two real-life murders in 2004 in Annesley Woodhouse, the former mining village where the series creator James Graham grew up, but the show’s two killings are really devices for exploring a much deeper, decades-old bitter divide.

Like many mining communities in Nottinghamshire, Annesley Woodhouse was divided. Some miners crossed the picket lines and carried on working. The NUM leadership refused to allow a national strike ballot, and the Nottinghamshire miners (and others) wanted to negotiate.

Police officers were brought in from London to protect the Nottinghamshire miners, and they did not shrink from wielding their batons. Decades on, the scars, and the rancour still lingers, says Graham. Even now those on opposite sides of the picket lines still avoid each other. “It’s unspoken and silent. It simmers and it’s real and people cross the street,” he told the Telegraph. “There is that pub for you, and that pub for you. There is still genuine pain and anger and resentment.”

All this provides a rich seam of storylines in Sherwood, from the hunt for a crossbow killer to the quest to unmask a police spy who infiltrated the community during the 1980s and stayed on afterwards. The cast is finely chosen. Robert Glenister gives a stand-out performance as DI Kevin Salisbury, a London police officer who returns to the village where he served during the strike, still haunted by a terrible decision he took then. Lesley Manville fizzes with energy as Julie Jackson, widow of the first murder victim, fuelled by grief and white wine.

All the components are there: nuanced, haunted characters, scenery that sweeps from prosaic rows of terraced houses to lush countryside

The 1980s period details are marvellous, from the Duran Duran hairstyles, padded shoulders and men’s wide sideburns to the smoky fug of the miner’s social club. Still, there were times when it felt like Sherwood was trying too hard. The storyline around Andy, a train driver turned self-pitying, spade-wielding murderer, felt grafted on.

Such quibbles aside, all the components are there: nuanced, haunted characters, scenery that sweeps from prosaic rows of terraced houses to lush countryside, and plenty of conflict among its lead characters.

Beyond the undoubted skill of Sherwood’s creators, is a wider message for commissioning editors: this is a hit series because there is a deep appetite among Britain’s television audience for dramas that tackle broader, even divisive, complicated social issues, that take a deep dive into sensitive terrain and are not afraid to demand attention from viewers. Most of all, programmes that try to answer the oldest questions: who are we now, and how did we get here? So it’s very good news that season two has been greenlit.

The Dutch crime thriller Fenix, now showing on Channel 4’s Walter Presents, is a slower burn, but no less rewarding. Set in Brabant, it steps into the dangerous, violent world of rival drug gangs. It reminded me of Floodland, which I reviewed in this column last November, set in the Dutch-Belgian borderlands. These wide flat plains may seem a little dull on first glance, but if the crime series unfolding there are anything to go by, appearances are deceptive.

Rifka Lodeizen gives an understated but engaging performance as Jara Terwijde, a local police officer returning to Brabant. She wants desperately to redeem her father, who set up a bungled operation in which several police officers were killed. But she is soon drawn into a very perilous world.

Shariff Korver, Fenix’s Venezuelan born director, shows elan and confidence as he steadily layers the story, taking us into the world of the local criminal dynasties, and bringing in a series of intriguing characters without revealing too much of their past. In this criminal world there is little glamour. Numerous scenes unfold in dingy trailer parks and gloomy forests.

I especially enjoyed the subplot revolving around Sev Herzof, a naive Orthodox Jewish man, who is unknowingly entangled with the Israeli mafia in Antwerp. The sudden scenes of violence as he discovers his inner courage and uses it to free himself from the Israelis’ clutches are almost Tarantino-esque in their comic brutality. Korver does not skimp on the gore. The climax of the series is literally gut-wrenching. I won’t say any more, except to advise don’t watch it after a steak dinner. Or anything involving red meat.