Not out of the woods yet
Director Clio Barnard joins executive producers Juliette Howell and Harriet Spencer to look back on making the second season of BBC drama Sherwood, building on the themes of season one and finding the delicate balance of character and issues in a state-of-the-nation series.
With any hit series that tells a complete story from beginning to end, the temptation to return for a second season can be too great to resist. Yet it is often a path fraught with difficulty.
Sherwood was one of the best series of 2022, threading together the story of two murders, a police manhunt and plenty of age-old animosity among friends and families bubbling back to the surface of a divided community still living in the aftermath of the miners’ strike three decades earlier.
James Graham’s compelling scripts were brought to life by a wonderful ensemble cast that served up a state-of-the-nation drama that kept the country talking during its six-part run – quite an achievement in the age of streaming and binge-viewing.
Such was the show’s success that the BBC naturally commissioned a second season, but could it ever live up to the first? Thankfully, Sherwood S2 has doubled down on those winning elements from its first run – fascinating characters, gripping action, star performances and storylines again inspired by real events that tap into the personal and the political through local gangs, old rivalries, revenge and betrayal.
Meanwhile, with the action set 10 years on from season one, the prospect of a new mine opening in the community offers the opportunity for new jobs and prosperity but threatens to reopen still-healing wounds, at the same time as the identity of a government spy from during the miners’ strike could be revealed.
David Morrissey (Ian St Clair), Lesley Manville (Julie Jackson), Lorraine Ashbourne (Daphne Sparrow), Perry Fitzpatrick (Rory Sparrow) and Philip Jackson (Mickey Sparrow) are among those to reprise their roles in season two, starring alongside new cast members including Monica Dolan (Ann Branson), David Harewood (Denis Bottomley), Robert Lindsay (Franklin Warner), Stephen Dillane (Roy Branson), Sharlene Whyte (Pam Bottomley), Christine Bottomley (Rachel Crossley), Ria Zmitrowicz (Lisa Waters) and Michael Balogun (Harry Summers).
Oliver Huntingdon (Ryan Bottomley), Jorden Myrie (Marcus Clarke) and Bethany Asher (Stephie Bottomley) also play pivotal roles in the series, for which award-winning writer and playwright Graham again teamed up with producer House Production and distributor BBC Studios.
“James has such a deep love for his characters and comes to his stories without any sense of pre-judgement,” House co-CEO and executive producer Juliette Howell tells DQ. “That’s what’s so interesting. But you have to immerse yourself in research and ask, ‘Is there a story that merits being told for season two?’
“It’s still very much about how our past informs our present, and that is so much the central launch for that second season. In season one, the 80s and the miners’ strike really informs a lot of that story. As we started talking in that research process and thinking about how each of the decades brought something different to that community, we just started talking around the 90s being a decade on from there and those ‘Shottingham’ days [the tabloid name attributed to Nottingham during a period of high gun crime in the early 2000s]. I guess it pushed on from there.”
“It was all held in James’s brilliant brain, and then it was us talking a lot about characters – all of the characters we had really fallen in love with and the difficult decisions to make [about leaving some out],” adds fellow exec Harriet Spencer. “Perhaps James couldn’t find an appropriate story for them, so it was just a process of looking at all those families.”
Howell and Spencer were part of the small group that collaborated closely with Graham as the S2 story was developed, often holding meetings around Howell’s kitchen table.
“There’s an informality to that but it’s also an openness to ideas, and that is born of a confidence and an ability to throw things up in the air and know they’ll land in the right way,” Howell says. “It’s not frightening to do. You know you can piece it together, and we did some of that in the early days.” Their group then got bigger and “even more fun” with the arrival of director Clio Barnard (The Essex Serpent, Ali & Ava) and producer Kate Ogborn (Life After Life, The North Water).
Barnard had been working with Spencer on another project when she watched S1, prompting her to send Spencer a message saying how much she loved the show. Then in January 2023, she received an email asking if she would be interested in directing S2.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been so sure that I definitely was 100% interested and really wanted to do it,” Barnard says. “We met. Juliette and Harriet sent me the document they’d got that roughed out what S2 was going to be and I thought it was brilliant. There’s the stuff about the mine, and I knew the crime element would be absolutely gripping because it had been in S1. I was in, and wanting to get the gig.”
To land the job, Barnard pitched her ideas using an “amazing” lookbook “that just blew us away,” Howell says. The images in the book represented her ideas for the series, most notably including some cooling towers that ended up in the final series, both when some characters stand inside one tower and as monuments within the show’s numerous landscape shots.
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“There were images of people as I’d imagined them from looking at the scripts,” Barnard says. “At the end of S1 when Julie Jackson [Manville] speaks about us being post-industrial and how we just refer to ourselves as what we were, it felt like this [S2] was then looking at that. How do we make that difficult transition? How do we say, ‘OK, we need to stop looking that way. We need to start looking this way.’ But it’s also very realistic about what the challenges are and how this whole group of people have been abandoned.”
Known for her feature film work until making her TV debut helming Apple TV+ drama The Essex Serpent in 2022, Barnard often wrote and directed her movies, meaning she could be “fast and loose” with the screenplays with the actors on set. “But with James’s stuff, you don’t need to be because the dialogue is so precise. There’s a real joy to that,” she says.
Coming to the second season of a series, Barnard sought to use the visual style laid down by Lewis Arnold and Ben A Williams in S1 and make it “as good as it could be.” She also had to incorporate new locations, including Nottingham city centre and the coast (some of the characters travel to the coastal town of Skegness, but not to enjoy the seaside), as well as new characters and whole new families.
“One of the things James talked about a lot was transition, thinking about transition from within each of the characters’ journeys and arcs and also in terms of from fossil fuels to renewables – but how do you make that transition?” she says. “There was something in that about scale and scale of nature, which I think was there in season one as well.”
Barnard is also a big fan of director Alan Clarke, whose film Rita, Sue & Bob Too inspired her first feature. Clarke and Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (itself influenced by a Clarke short of the same name) also influenced Barnard and Sherwood DOP Simon Tindall’s use of following and leading shots, with the camera often moving in front of or behind characters.
“We didn’t ever want it to be style over content, but that was a reference point for us,” she says. “When Ryan Bottomley walks into Ashfield, when Harry walks through the crime scene at the end of episode two or when there’s a lovely shot through the Sparrows’ farmhouse, that’s what we were referencing and thinking about and kept returning to.”
The show was filmed entirely on location and Graham wrote many of the real buildings and settings into the series, “which meant we had to go there,” Barnard says. Those locations included the council building where the sheriff of Nottingham, Lisa, is based, and County Hall, a building with statues of miners at its door.
When it came to working with the show’s ensemble of actors, “all actors are different and need and want different things, so it’s about adapting, in a way,” Barnard says. “I like things that are actor-led, so you make sure they’re happy with the blocking or that it feels right to them and then we respond to them.
“Then there’s obviously other bits where you want the big drone shot coming out of the cooling tower, because why wouldn’t you? It’s a spectacular location. The other thing is the production design and thinking about character. [Production designer] Jane Levick cares deeply about all the characters, so all of that detail that you put into a set like the Bottomleys’ home, you understand something about this family through the things we’re looking at in there.”
Directing such a large cast meant Sherwood was something of a first for Barnard, whose role reunited her with past collaborators Dolan, Bottomley, Ashbourne and Robert Emms (Samuel Warner). She also picks out Huntingdon and Asher as “fantastic” talents.
“There’s usually some sort of cast hierarchy, but it doesn’t feel like that on Sherwood. And the ethos of the show, like the themes of a show about community, feel like they’re there on set and in the DNA of the production,” Barnard adds. “James is so collaborative and open. It fosters this atmosphere of collaboration and it was a very happy shoot.”
“That’s an incredibly special and unusual feeling, and one of the absolute joys in coming back for a second season is you get to see that,” Howell says. “And as new people come in and join that spirit. We were really lucky that all those new members of cast embraced that. Some actors were also coming out of a Nottingham workshop, which is something we’ve always wanted to support with that brilliant talent coming through.”
Any project considered to be a state-of-the-nation piece, one that speaks to the identity, history and values of a particular place, might crumble under the weight of that label. Yet through director of drama Lindsay Salt, the BBC is now seeking to redefine those types of stories as “dynamic and vibrant and necessary,” rather than “dusty and old-fashioned.”
Sherwood will undoubtedly stand out as a marker for these types of shows going forward, with Graham looking to weave the personal and the political through a snapshot of a particular British community.
“Community felt the most important thing for James,” notes Spencer. “The politics were interweaved through that, but his priority was capturing that accurately and speaking to where he grew up and the people that lived there.”
“Actually, Clio’s done this so much in her work as well,” says Howell. “It’s a really delicate balance to achieve that. But it’s that emotional connection to the plight of all those characters and then the plight of the wider community that shines a light on those issues.”
tagged in: BBC, BBC Studios, Clio Barnard, Harriet Spencer, House Production, Juliette Howell, Sherwood