Television

A half-story of the miners’ strike

Some aspects of the Channel 4 documentary on the 1984-85 miners’ strike, The Battle for Britain , are worth paying attention to. It includes interviews with former striking miners, who give straightforward, honest and hard-hitting accounts of what happened to them and, in particular, their appalling treatment at the hands of the police. The contrast is stark with the accounts from miners who worked through the strike: they seem blissfully unaware of the broader issues of the strike. They offer a fixation with the idea of “intimidation” as driving the strike, but little in the way of evidence...

Roy Battersby (1936-2024)

Probably best known for the TV drama Leeds United! (1974) which features a women’s textile workers’ strike (and was discussed in Solidarity 584 ), Roy Battersby had a highly productive and varied career as a writer and director of mainly TV dramas. He started off as part of that generation of left-inclined writers and directors (such as Ken Loach, Alan Bleasdale, Jim Allen, Dennis Potter, David Hare) who worked at the BBC on the Play for Today and then branched out into writing Cracker , Between the Lines , Morse , and many other dramas. As one of his last works he directed the film Red...

Dirty, stumbling and provoking

Shane Meadows makes films about the working class. He’s best known for the This is England quartet (2006 — 2015) which was TV work. He also does cinema. He has recently did his first period drama, The Gallows Pole ( on iPlayer ), based on a novel about real events in 18th century England. A gang forges coins in a desperate bid to put bread on the table. The men, women and children who make up the gang take tremendous risks and squeeze from their poverty just enough energy for the task. No aspect of their humanity is wasted in the project: the murderer, the idiot, the coward, the angel, the...

The Monocled Mutineer

More political TV drama: this week I want to highlight The Monocled Mutineer (BBC 1986), written by Alan Bleasdale (best known for Boys from the Blackstuff ). The action centres on a World War One mutiny by British and Commonwealth troops at Étaples, an army camp on the French coast. One of the leaders is Percy Toplis (Paul McGann) who disguises himself as an officer (hence the monocle). The broadcast caused protests from various quarters, mainly, I suspect because the topic of mutinous allied troops rising against their officers and the war was the “dirty linen” that many did not to be washed...

Trevor Griffiths and 1945 revisited

Sadly, the work of Trevor Griffiths, one of the political playwrights who emerged in the Sixties, is nowadays neglected. The BBC, for whatever reason, seems reluctant to re-broadcast his work. I want to highlight his 1981 TV drama Country . The action focuses on a gathering of the wealthy Carlion family where they discuss who will take over the brewery business that has made them fabulously wealthy. The family patriarch, Sir Frederic Carlion (Leo McKern), is getting old, needs to retire, and favours his son Philip Carlion (James Fox). However, James seems hardly “business material”: he works...

ADHD: the big scandal is waiting lists

A BBC Panorama programme on 15 May focused on private companies offering unreliable diagnoses of ADHD (“attention deficit hyperactivity disorder”) and too-casual resort to medication. Its misplaced focus will damage the fight of people with ADHD for recognition and against discrimination. it is a scandal that people have to pay thousands of pounds to private companies to be assessed for ADHD. But the real scandal is that many-years-long NHS waiting lists are forcing them to do so. Of course, unscrupulous pill-pushers will thrive in this climate. The deeper scandal is that our society...

150 at Modi film showing

Over 150 people attended a showing of “India: The Modi Question” at SOAS university in London on 7 February, organised by the India Labour Solidarity Campaign ( ILS ). The BBC documentary — about Narendra Modi’s role in the 2002 massacres of Muslims in Gujarat — has been banned in India, and students in particular have suffered repression for trying to watch it. The SOAS event was an opportunity to watch the programme (its first hour-long instalment) together and discuss the issues, while demonstrating solidarity with comrades in India. As well as ILS, the meeting heard from Aakashi Bhatt...

Kino Eye: Tory slime-drama at its best

The Thatcher years are over and an unstable but moderate Conservative government has taken her place. However, Tory Chief Whip, Francis Urquhart (Ian Richardson) is miffed that he has been overlooked for promotion. He secretly schemes to have a new leader (himself) installed and the knives are out. House of Cards , a BBC drama broadcast in late 1990, may be fiction but its depiction of back-stabbing, double-dealing, lying and cheating rings very true. The only element missing from the present Tory leadership contest is that no-one (so far) has been thrown from the roof of the House of Commons...

Russia's opposition and Navalny

Daniel Roher’s documentary Navalny , now available on iPlayer, was not intended as a response to the invasion of Ukraine. But it sheds light both on the Putin regime, and the inadequacies of Navalny as an anti-Putin leader. The documentary’s main focus, Navalny’s poisoning and the investigative operation to find the FSB agents responsible, tells a thrilling story, and watching Navalny call and interrogate his own would-be murderer is as incredible now as it was when the video was released in December 2020. Navalny himself is clearly a brave, charismatic, and funny man. Were the political...

How Peaky Blinders insults Jessie Eden

Jessie Eden (Charlie Murphy) and Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy) in Peaky Blinders WARNING: SPOILERS With the new series of the BBC’s Peaky Blinders out on 27 February, there will have been many people watching or rewatching the earlier seasons. Peaky Blinders has occasionally been criticised, justly, for verging on glorifying brutal gangsters. But it has mainly been praised, justly, for its thrilling plots and striking visual aesthetics. The show, about the men and women of a family of working-class Irish-Romani origin in 1920s Birmingham, has elements of more substantial interest too. Indeed...

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