- This review contains spoilers
James Graham may be one of Britain’s finest dramatists, but the finale of Sherwood (BBC One) demonstrated that even he can’t resist a well-worn plot convention. Namely: when a character is about to murder their victim, they don’t simply pull the trigger and hightail it out of there. Instead, they take the time to deliver a speech, complete with confessions of past crimes and plans for the future, wanging on for so long that their victim manages to escape.
Still, at least this climactic scene gave us time to listen to Monica Dolan, who was wielding the gun. If you need a demonstration of an actor with great range, look no further – what a jump from sweet sub-postmistress Jo Hamilton in Mr Bates vs The Post Office to her frankly terrifying role here, as crime family matriarch Ann Branson.
She was matched by Lorraine Ashbourne as Daphne Sparrow, now a vengeful widow. I’m not sure how the Bafta jurors are going to separate these two when awards season rolls around, because both have been terrific throughout the series and Graham gave these two formidable women some corking lines of foul-mouthed dialogue in their showdown.
The problem with this final episode was that we didn’t see enough of them, or the other Sparrows. I’m not sure too many viewers will have cared about Julie Jackson’s house sale, or Franklin Warner’s mine project, or some convoluted side-plot in which the Sheriff of Nottingham (the show’s worst character) was poisoned by a former prison inmate’s brother in revenge for council funding cuts. And then there was David Morrissey, always a pleasure to watch but here given little to do except mill around looking tearful and trying to date Lesley Manville.
Unlike series one, which dealt directly with the repercussions of the Miners’ Strike, series two felt awkward when politics was thrown into the story. Nowhere was this more evident than in the closing scene, when the Sheriff made a metaphor-laden speech about working-class communities (“We have to start believing in ourselves a lot more, planting our own seeds to grow our own trees…”), which seems quite poetic for a council meeting.
But the ensemble cast was first-rate – including Oliver Huntingdon as the dangerously restive Ryan – and the action scenes gripped. By the end, Daphne’s long-lost daughter had thrown in her lot with the Sparrows. Ann Branson met a watery end, but if Graham is inclined to give us more Sherwood, I’d drink up a spin-off prequel about her evil ways.
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