"A new Shane Meadows drama is in the works – and this time he's working with the BBC to dramatise an "remarkable true story" of a "revolutionary criminal enterprise" from 18th century Yorkshire. The filmmaker and screenwriter has previously worked with Channel 4 on his 2019 series The Virtues, and on the This Is England TV spin-offs. But now he's off to the BBC to tell a very different kind of story, titled The Gallows Pole.
Based on the novel by Benjamin Myers, it fictionalises the rise and fall of David Hartley and the Cragg Vale Coiners. Or as the BBC puts it, "Set against the backdrop of the coming industrial revolution in eighteenth century Yorkshire, the compelling drama follows the enigmatic David Hartley, as he assembles a gang of weavers and land-workers to embark upon a revolutionary criminal enterprise that will capsize the economy and become the biggest fraud in British history..."