In July 2004, in Annesley Woodhouse in Nottinghamshire, a man called Robert Boyer shot ex-miner Keith Frogson with a crossbow on his doorstep. Boyer then hacked Frogson to death with a sword and set fire to his home. Frogson’s daughter and her husband were still inside.

The same month, another man called Terry Rodgers was living with his daughter Chanel at her home in nearby Huthwaite, when he shot her four times. Both Boyer and Rodgers went into hiding in the same woodland, leading a huge number of police to descend on the former mining village as the search for them took place.

Six-part BBC drama series Sherwood, which aired last month, was based on these two murders—writer James Graham was living close by at the time—and follows two police officers, one from the local Nottinghamshire force and one from the Met, in their hunt for the fugitives.

In the fictionalised version of events, Gary Jackson, played with typical fierceness by Alun Armstrong, is a proud National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) activist in an area dominated by the Union of Democratic Mineworkers (UDM). Gary is found dead in the street, shot by a crossbow, his little dog missing. His last known whereabouts was the local miners’ social club the previous night, where he was involved in an altercation with one of the working/scab UDM miners, Dean, played with palpable anger by Sean Gilder.

Gary’s wife Julie (the mesmerising Lesley Manville), meanwhile, is completely estranged from her sister Cathy although they live practically next door to each other. This is because Cathy, brilliantly played by Claire Rushbrook, married a working miner, whose adult son is a killer on the run. These characterisations help situate the drama in the deep divisions that fractured some mining communities during the strike, and continued to lie just beneath the surface for decades afterward.

David Morrissey plays Ian St Clair, the lead investigating officer from the local force. St Clair is less than happy to discover that Gary’s arrest records from a tragic incident in 1984 have been redacted, and even more irate when Met officer Kevin Salisbury (Robert Glenister) shows up to help with the investigation—particularly after it was Salisbury who provided an alibi for Gary, securing his release from custody. But the powers-that-be within the Met don’t actually want Salisbury to investigate—they’re mainly trying to fob him off until he retires early and goes quietly, as his reputation has been tarnished ever since that fateful deployment to police the miners’ strike.

As the two police protagonists reluctantly form a partnership, they begin to realise that the spycops scandal is central to the events now unfolding. It may also have been the catalyst for the historical tragedy that binds them both together.

With Sherwood, Graham has succeeded in writing a complex and utterly compelling story. Everything you could hope for is here, including the dream cast epitomising TV talent, perhaps the finest to appear on a British screen in one series. The relationship between the two police officers is sparky, and when the local chief constable announces that the Met will be sending scores of extra officers into the ex-pit village to strengthen the manhunt, the tension is palpable, the imagery when they arrive overwhelming. What I take issue with, however, is the authenticity of the portrayal of the undercover police deployment.

In 1968, in response to the rise of protests against the Vietnam War, Scotland Yard set up a secretive undercover unit called the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) to infiltrate left-wing groups, often using the names of dead children to provide cover. With these fake identities created by the state, undercover officers deceived women activists into long-term intimate relationships. I’m one of those women.

When the spycops scandal was uncovered due to revelations about the deceitful relationships and that the SDS had spied on the family of Stephen Lawrence, then-home secretary Theresa May set up a public inquiry into undercover policing. The NUM was awarded core participant status as it was spied upon, along with other trade unions like the Fire Brigades Union (FBU). Many campaign groups are represented, too, including the CND, Reclaim the Streets, and London Greenpeace. There are specific groups for family justice campaigns, relatives of the children whose names were stolen, and the one in which I sit, those affected by relationships with undercover officers.

This inquiry, however, is now one of the longest running, most expensive inquiries ever undertaken in this country. There has even been talk of ending it prematurely, unthinkable for the people affected.

Arriving as it does at this moment, with growing consternation about the inquiry and the chance of ever getting to the truth, Sherwood was heralded as the drama that would really tell this story. It was a prime-time opportunity to draw attention to this decades-long anti-democratic insult, to recount it with authenticity, to expose the brutality that devastated people’s lives. In practice, it does well in building tension and creating a backdrop of suspicion, and Christopher Fairbank brings to life a grotesque former spycop who, when tracked down and confronted by Met detective Salisbury, takes his own life.

But come on. That’s not how it works. Those who engaged in undercover operations have enjoyed the ongoing backing of the state, including widespread anonymity in the current inquiry which prevents victims from finding out the reality of what happened.

The spycop at the centre of Sherwood turns out, in fact, to be a woman, Daphne Sparrow. She has stayed on after her deployment, having fallen in (real) love with local fly-by-night Mickey Sparrow, the drama turning injustice into romance.

Again—that’s not how it works. The Met has tried to claim that relationships were based on ‘genuine feelings’, but the sheer scale of the scandal shows the process was systematic. When the officers’ deployments were done, they didn’t stick around—they made excuses to disappear. The depth of misogyny involved has been clear from the first revelations.

The police were portrayed too sympathetically overall. As for the divide in the community, the NUM miners were painted as intransigent, unwilling to reconcile or forget the past. That doesn’t sit well either: never cross a picket line is one of my rules for living.

There were moments in which the show that did capture the devastation that the spycops scandal wrought on people’s lives. In one scene Lindsay Duncan, playing the NUM lawyer, gives a background report on undercover policing to the investigating cops, featuring an astonishing speech. As her character says:

If they used spies to stir up trouble and tear people apart… Well, you never stood a chance. Hillsborough, the miners’ strike, phone-hacking, Stephen Lawrence… Some of the most unsavoury aspects of British policing over the last half a century that we are managing to drag out of the darkness and into the light. It all demands justice. And you know what, you do too. Keep going.

But it could have gone further, been braver, not painted the cops as the real good guys, morally conflicted, or innocent youngsters. Those who grew up in ex-mining communities have their own memories of those times, and I believe Sherwood captured much of that well. But those of us affected by the spycops scandal have yet to see our story come to life on screen. So we do what Duncan says—we keep going.