The background to this show is fascinating and, mostly, handled well,. The notorious miners' strikes of 1984 in Britain, and the way they polarised and divided the mining communities themselves, and all of Britain, has left a black stain on British society, and particularly on the Metropolitan police force who used a very heavy hand against the striking miners.
In present-day Sherwood, a lone archer fires at people in a now depressed mining town full of bitter memories of rival unions and collaborators, and we are invited to wonder if the killer of at least one old miner agitator might somehow be connected to the rumour of undercover metropolitan police officers, sent to spy on the miners. While stretching the obvious Robin Hood comparison a bit thinly, nevertheless the ingredients are here for a half-decent if somewhat improbable thriller.
But (as so often in what passes for cutting edge TV drama these days) where things fall apart is with the sometimes ridiculous coincidences on which the plot hinges. A Met officer returning to the town for a single day meets an old flame in the supermarket. Well imagine that. Then it turns out the same old flame is now best friends with the cops nemesis from back in their raw recruit days - the same cop who is now his local, superior liasion. The outlaw Archer, and still another man, also on the run for murder (he's killed his daughter-in-law for reasons that seem completely unconnected), are being hunted by 'hundreds' of Met officers through Sherwood Forest, yet both of them, coincidentally, turn up at a remote campsite at precisely the same time, just as the two camping strangers conveniently decide to take an unexplained walk, leaving cooked food on the pan (no animals in this forest?), their tent wide open and - why not? - both of their cellphones charging on their sleeping bags. With the hundreds of cops, sniffer dogs and even helicopters searching the woods, the two campers are somehow entirely oblivious to the ongoing search, as if the woods were not just a few hundreds acres of woodland but the Amazonian jungle. And what about their phones? No one thought to ring them to let them know 'the biggest manhunt' in recent British history was going on around them?
Oh, and though the hundreds of cops can't find their elusive archer, they do almost immediately come across the note he leaves for them, stuck with an arrow to a random tree. What's that line about not being able to see the woods for the trees? Maybe the needle in the haystack is the better analogy.
And on and on it goes. So that what looks quite promising in the first couple of episodes is just a mess by three and four and five. It's a lucky thing that this is just six episodes long: the dumb desire to find out 'whodunnit' can only take so many scowling miners in flashback and horribly choreographed search scenes in the woods where extras dressed as coppers plod through the ferns and wonder, as I kept wondering myself, if they weren't just wasting their time.
