Shane Meadows is a great British filmmaker now in his middle generation who I always like to say brought traditional British kitchen-sink realism into the 21st century. From the very beginnings and his first films, he has been interested in the fates of marginals, people from the edge of society, and after the extraordinary film “This is England” and the series of the same name, which dealt with the state of English society during the Thatcherism of the eighties, he again filmed a period drama. But the plot of “The Gallows Pole” takes place much earlier, in the sixties of the 18th century at the very beginning of the industrial revolution, somewhere in rural Yorkshire, where his films usually take place.
The invention of the steam engine changed everything and led to the transformation from a classical feudal to an industrial society, but as is usually the case with revolutions, many did not succeed in them. Until the advent of steam engines, the people of Cragg Vale in West Yorkshire lived a relatively solid life as laborers in a primitive textile industry. But soon they became unnecessary, the surpluses and nearby Halifax turned into a center of production and trade, leaving the surrounding towns and villages in misery and poverty. David Hartley (Michael Socha, whom Meadows first gave a chance to in This is England) returns to such Cragg Vale after seven years of absence, and not knowing that his father has just died.
And Meadows made a three-part mini-series based on the 2017 historical book of the same name by Benjamin Myers, which deals with the true story of one of the biggest frauds in British history. The Cragg Vale gang is remembered in legend and folklore as perhaps the first modern counterfeiting organization and David devised a way to produce gold coins identical to the official ones. However, Meadows did not make a classic adaptation of the book, but his “The Gallows Pole” is actually a kind of prequel to Myers’ book, and we learn the story of how this criminal organization that gathered impoverished peasants was actually created.
Meadows was known for his naturalistic approach and style in everything he recorded before, and this time he added a slightly modernist touch almost on the edge of “Peaky Blinders”. And don’t worry, it’s not a copy of an already seen style, but in an extremely original and perhaps unprecedented way, the classic naturalistic style has been upgraded with a modern flair, contemporary and extraordinary rock music. Although everything here looks authentic and convincing, exactly the way places and people looked and behaved in the second half of the 18th century, it seems much freer than classic period drama. Previously, Meadows was known for allowing the actors a lot of improvisation, and this time it worked because all these mostly unknown actors are extremely convincing.
It’s a series that also stands out for its slightly subtle, Meadowsian humor, and that band of renegades that David will gather seems like a gang of the poor and hungry that Robin Hood once gathered. The people who got the better end of the industrial revolution have now found a way to get revenge on the society that used and rejected them. That’s how the series begins, when David returns home after seven years of living in England and realizes that everything has failed and that all his neighbors are up to their necks in debt. So even though he returns seriously wounded, he does not return empty-handed, but has brought a special item.
A stamp for making official British coins, and he found a way to use it. Out of the ten coins whose edges will be peeled off, Dave and his team will create the eleventh, and this entrepreneurial venture by the West Yorkshire company will almost bankrupt the UK ten years later as their gold coins flood the country. Unfortunately, the mini-series stops at the moments when the story should become the most interesting and when society realized that what they are doing is passing. Maybe in a few years Meadows will bring a continuation of the story about these counterfeiters, but this way it somehow remained unfinished for me, even though the story is not only interesting, but also filmed in an atypical, stylistically extremely original way. At times it seems that reality and fiction are mixed, and in fact this is not surprising because “The Gallows Pole” is more than a solid example of the genre that is also called historical fiction.