Expecting a gore fest of violence, degradation and societal breakdown? Instead we have a completely immersive social realist drama with rounded, fully recognisable people. Just people from 250 years ago.
The Gallows Poll pulls off the extraordinarily hard trick of meshing (rather than mashing) language which conveys both a sense of the period but also the feeling that these are people like us.
The result is unique in achieving a kind of demotic drama that is true to experience but does not fetishise authenticity or worry about mixing modern and period language and terminology. Somehow it’s both of the time and universal to the experience of common people.
And it's vivid and funny (so very, very funny), and touching and ridiculous. A world which we enter in media res with no guardrails and just a requirement to pick up the cadence and the rhythm of what is happening. To just listen to these people talk.
And how they talk. The dialogue and the delivery are amazing. The verbal sparring between David and Grace is utterly hilarious, deeply moving and entirely believable. The mardy, mouthy, spurned girl nursing a deep hurt but armed with an instinctive intelligence and the rough, taciturn, confused and contrite man who left her and has done very bad things in the meantime and now returns looking for all the world like an embarrassed teenager in her presence.
This is set against massive proto-industrial change; the end of the era of 'putting out' textile manufacture and the centralisation of production in factories with all of the attendant fracturing and damage to a society with no safety net other than that created by the members of that society.
So what we have is a co-operative movement by people harnessing their disparate skills and experience to respond to exploitation; artisans who can apply themselves to solve new problems.
The moral economy of the crowd in operation.
The psych or trippy tinge to proceedings adds a frisson of the weirdness of the folk tale but the stag men are more creatures of the imagination than manifestations of the supernatural. It's all happening within David's head and the dialogue between them magnificently undercuts the portentousness which usually attends minatory words from the other dimension.
One suspects that a follow on series will inevitably be a tougher watch given that we know where this is headed once the authorities start to become aware that quiet part of Yorkshire is suddenly awash with newly minted guineas.
However, in the meantime celebrate the success of collective endeavour in the 18th century equivalent of a rave.
Even the stag men are let off the leash in the closing credits which has them throwing some shapes worthy, if that is the word, of Bez in a 90s music video.
Would these people genuflect?
Do me a favour.
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