03.03.2005

Miners: this was our strike

William Ivory Faith BBC1, Monday February 28

This month sees the 20th anniversary of the end of the great coal strike of 1984-85. BBC's production Faith is a drama set against the backdrop of that strike and those tumultuous events. It is a fiction, insofar as the characters and their lives are fictions, but the events and the location and most of the supporting actors are all real, and actually were part of that defining year. With real miners and their wives as support actors, and with National Union of Mineworkers officials picking up inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the film and story line as it went along, this film ought to be at least realistic - and it is. Shot at Hatfield colliery, where the headgear and pit stand frozen and intact, much as they did for the 12 months of the strike, the scenes are set in the streets and communities based upon the fortunes of that mine - Stainforth, Dunscroft, Thorne and Moorends. Up to 240 of the local pit folk starred in the making of this film, and not simply as wannabes. They did it because they were concerned that events portraying their lives and the real situations they participated in were not sold short. They will not have been disappointed. The story itself is about loyalties, with their conflicts and pressures. It is about truth, fiction, manipulation, duplicity and heroism. It covers the strike, the strike-breakers, the police (local and imported), husbands and wives, lovers and cheats. The scenes are moving and for those who took part in those events some will have been heartrending and provoked memories only just now either starting to fade or else taking on new-found significance. The tremendous importance of that strike and everything that was fought for is perhaps clearer now than it was then - although now it is too late to do anything about it, and one is only left with the memory of where you were standing at that time. There are things wrong with the film in terms of accuracy, of course - this is a drama, we have to keep telling ourselves. Pickets did not come back from the picket line, with their heads split open and faces bloody, and stand in the bar having a pint - we went home first and had a bath. Cops would not have been served in the local pubs during the occupation: they did not get served in many paper shops or fruit stalls, never mind pubs. We were not on some out-of-control roller-coaster which we could not stop: this was our strike, our stand - and by and large the ordinary miners and their communities kept it on the rails . The outcome was never a forgone conclusion - we never were on a hiding to nothing and the truth is, despite all the obstacles and overwhelming problems, we came close on more than one occasion to actually winning the whole thing. That bigger picture is perhaps not even attempted here, and that is fair enough. It is a damn good drama as it stands, in tight focus; and one which will provoke much debate - not simply among those who were there, but among all those young people growing up in its shadow 20 years down the line: young people who are left with the legacy of its defeat. David Douglass NUM branch secretary, Hatfield Main