The Gallows Pole, BBC Two, review: Shane Meadows swaps polemic for folk horror
There’s an element of chaos about Shane Meadows’s The Gallows Pole (BBC Two). Good chaos, like a warehouse party or an impromptu gig. It’s a three-part period piece and an adaptation of a bestselling-novel (by Benjamin Myers), but Meadows doesn’t seem that interested in either the period or the plot in the book.
His telling of the story of the Cragg Vale Coiners and their chief, David Hartley, who ran a successful coining business and protection racket from his moorland home in the 1760s, is rife with flagrant linguistic anachronisms and, in three hours, only gets as far as the gang’s formation. I’m not sure Meadows cares: as with his This is England trilogy and several of his films before that, what he wants to capture on camera is human energy, community and connection. And in that regard, The Gallows Pole is a triumph.
The three-parter is filled with many of Meadows’s usual actors, with Michael Socha, normally a Meadows ensemble player, elevated to the series’ lead as “King” David. It’s an inspired move – Socha is dynamite, a remarkable combination of coiled physicality and stoned languor. He’s also a natural comic performer, which means The Gallows Pole is often very funny – again, worlds away from its source material, which aspired to a sort of pagan folk epic. Meadows nods to that in the form of the mythical “Stag Men” who Hartley sees in visions, but he can’t restrain himself from laughing at the inherent silliness of men dressed as animals in cloaks and masks.
Similarly, the series comes with a socio-political undercurrent. It charts the early days of the Industrial Revolution and what the dark satanic mills did to cottage industry and community cohesion, but that’s not Meadows’s focus. Out of all those words, the one he is most interested in is “community”, and in his films community always coheres in the end. Music, invariably, is part of the glue.
So it is that episode one of The Gallows Pole is essentially an hour of the Cragg Valers first mourning David’s dead father, and then singing, dancing and wise-cracking their way through his wake. Compared to most modern TV, plot happens almost as an afterthought, when it happens at all. Meadows loves his company so much that he lingers on them, often in slow motion, for scene after scene.
But you can see why: the performances, the humour and just the life that he manages to capture on film are irresistible. This is a gang that, within half an hour, you want to join, no matter what they’re up to.
