‘I was worried, is this irresponsible? Was I right to do this?’

I eye James Graham’s heavy, floral drapes warily over Zoom. “Sorry, I’m in a hotel,” he clarifies. “As you can see, it’s not very working class!”

It is six days since the writer delivered the Edinburgh TV Festival MacTaggart Lecture in the form of a gloriously polite, industrial kick up the class’s arse (capped by the grateful working-class chorus of “Thanks for inviting me!”), and the morning after the second episode of Sherwood aired, proving that the initial rave reviews were fully justified.

As we speak, Sir Keir Starmer, the prime minister of seven weeks, is delivering his “Sorry, it’s going to get worse for you, lads” speech (that’s me) from the garden of Number 10, also known as the location of the reported swing-breaking pandemic party. It’s symbolism worthy of the country’s finest playwright (or “professional liar”, as Graham prefers to call himself).

Before creating the BBC primetime series, Graham made quite famous fables from his lies: ITV’s Who wants to be a millionaire? cough scandal drama Quizand the Channel 4 TV film Brexit: The Uncivil Warin which Benedict Cumberbatch made an uncomfortably convincing Dominic Cummings. But if their success meant that James Graham was being talked about at certain dinner tables, his crime drama became a state of the nation surprise, Sherwood, he was talked about everywhere.

Few shows evoke places like this (his birthplace of Ashfield, and every other community his industry has seen disappear) and the people who call those places home, while simultaneously crafting complex, tightly plotted, high-stakes dramas that work for any screen size. I might even call it “Nottingham Noir,” if it weren’t something James Graham would (rightly) despise.

By the time the final episode of season one, which revolved around two real-life murders in a former mining community, aired in June 2022, it had garnered rave reviews and a UK audience of 7.5 million. He began work on the second a week later, at a time when, he says, “we were about to enter chapter 17 of the mad age” – no one yet knew that Liz Truss would soon take power, for just 49 days, and that the Conservative Party would have just been out of office when Sherwood finally back.

When it hit TV last month, it appeared under a headline Graham had written with new director (and great chronicler of the working class) Clio Barnard (Ali and Ava, The gazebo): “Transition”.

To put it bluntly, things are starting to shift. Or at least, they’re starting to get ready. After MacTaggart—which Graham devoted exclusively to “everyone’s least favorite diversity and representation category”—he and the festival’s charitable arm, The TV Foundation, announced the Impact Unit, a plan to open up the industry to the working class. “It’s not about micro-solutions to a macro crisis—saying, ‘We’re going to set up a grant that benefits three people,’” Graham says now. “It’s a cultural rethink, a rethink of the whole ecosystem.”

An ecosystem largely closed off to children receiving state education. “The collapse of arts in schools,” Graham says, “(is) just fucking devastating… I really hope the new administration turns that around.” In the meantime, he’s “trying to put those experiences into stories and popular television.”

You can see why Sherwood – a too-rarely respectful portrait of working-class life originally intended as a one-off – had to return. An anthology series was born under Graham’s “tales from the red wall” tagline, the overarching principle that a series would “Sherwood-y things: talking about our past, about the collapse of industry, and how crime and marginalization are affected by the loss of work or identity. It felt like there were just so many more stories.”

The crossbow murders of the first season have given way to a tale of bloody revenge, sparked by a senseless shooting, and a plan that could drag the community forwards as easily as back: the proposed reopening of a mine in the brutalist cooling towers that still dominate the East Midlands landscape (which, for Graham, symbolise that “you can’t escape the bloody past, because it’s been built”).

This time, the writer was inspired by truths that are universal across the political spectrum, such as the sense that nothing works in our country. “I wanted to imagine what would happen if none of the elements of local government worked anymore,” he says. “And you add a crisis, like a series of revenge killings or rising gun violence. How is that going to be sustained? That’s not partisan politics, that’s just the reality of deprived local communities struggling to function.”

These new stories are brought to life in one fell swoop by a host of new characters who have entered the Hall of Fame: Monica Dolan’s middle-aged mob boss Ann Branson, the bad guy with a big heart Ryan Bottomley (Oliver Huntingdon) and her sister Stephie (Bethany Asher).

All immediately go head-to-head with established village icons Daphne Sparrow (Lorraine Ashbourne), Julie Jackson (Lesley Manville) and Ian St Clair (David Morrissey). Essential in posing the questions that dominate this series for both the generation defined by deindustrialisation and the generation after, whose prospects were shattered by the inequality that followed: what remains of the past, what is the future, how do we move forward?

They are questions familiar to Graham’s own former mining village in Nottinghamshire, the place where his family and friends still live. The place where he gets his ultimate approval. “It’s the most important thing,” he says firmly, considering it more important than any prize he’s actually won.

It’s a community he not only cares about but protects, even reveres (he jumps off our Zoom after 40 minutes to talk to his local radio station, before returning, visibly moved by their support). It’s a relationship that’s earned, after Graham faced “understandable assumptions about exploitation” with the first series’ storylines based on real-life murders in his village and the deep divisions among miners.

In response, James Graham did what no writer in his right mind would do: he joined the village Facebook group. “It wasn’t easy at first,” he says with obvious understatement. But after each episode, he reappeared.

The oft-heard refrain: “Shouldn’t we let sleeping dogs sleep?” It’s something Graham, as a writer, can’t agree with—”I think we should question those sleeping dogs. Wake them up”—but still, by the time the final episode aired, “the mood was completely different.” They liked his show, and they respected him for showing up.

Now it’s about staying true to his birthplace. Much of this series was filmed in the East Midlands (Manchester was used for series one during the pandemic – the Facebook group wasn’t happy), with time spent in Nottingham Prison, with violence reduction teams and gun crime officers in the city. One of them gave Graham a key line that “shaped the tone of the show,” he says. “It’s almost permission – because it’s a darker, more violent show.” That one line (which will appear in a later episode): “We’ve lost control.”

This is probably what gave Graham his own control back, after the wheels nearly fell off the last time. “Before the first series I started to get… I can only describe it as a real existential dread that came along,” he says. “It happened on a Sunday afternoon, about 4pm, and it was paralysing. I was really angry about it and I didn’t know why. I think it had something to do with catastrophising: ‘Did I do the right thing? Is it irresponsible? Did I break my relationship with some of these people and that community?’ It got really bad, like I started thinking, what am I actually going to do about this? I need to see someone.”

Ultimately, fiction saved Graham: the second series was “loosely inspired” by the violence and shootings of the mid-2000s (including revenge killings, one of which also took place on the coast), but essentially a tapestry of James Graham’s lies. “It’s broken through that Sunday anxiety a bit,” he says. “[It’s]not completely gone, but it’s much easier. I don’t have a personal, direct relationship with the people who were in the real stories, and there’s a format now that people understand.”

This time, after the first episode aired, he didn’t check his phone until noon the next day — whereas before he’d hit X on “refresh, refresh, refresh.” Maybe, he says, “I’m becoming more relaxed about external validation.”

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Series three would certainly be the test for this new James Graham, although he can’t confirm the news. So what are his other concerns? He says he understands Labour’s position on the pace of change, the challenge of levelling the playing field across the country: “There are fundamental problems at the bottom of those places. It’s going to take a decade, a national plan and tons of money, unfortunately – to get it right.”

He is even optimistic about their ability to bring the arts and the working class back together. “Why don’t young people have access to that stuff?” he asks. “I really think Keir Starmer gets that. I’ve had the chance to talk to him a little bit over the last year. He came to see Dear England” – his fictional play/ode to the national game, and manager Gareth Southgate – “and what appealed to him was seeing an auditorium full of young people with club football shirts on. I think his belief in mass access to culture is real and felt”.

Will these conversations continue? Will he be part of the policies being formulated? “Yes, I would be happy to talk to the government about anything,” he says. “But I wouldn’t presume to know the answers. That’s the most working-class answer ever.” And yes, of course, he ends with that familiar, grateful refrain: “Thanks for inviting me!”

Sherwood will be broadcast on Sunday and Monday evenings at 9pm on BBC One