By Dusty Hughes. Fringe theatre transfer to the screen set in the 1973-4 winter of the three day week, following a clan of Trotskyite activists led by Kevin McNally.
Read MorePosts Tagged With 'Strikes'
Factory, The
By David Hopkins. Tragi-comic tale of a factory lock-out, with the business relocating to Wales and manager Leonard Rossiter and skeleton staff (including Ray Winstone) attempting bravely (and foolishly) to carry on as usual.
Read MoreCome the Revolution
By Robin Chapman. Plumber’s mates become embroiled in plans for a workers’ revolt in Manchester.
Read MoreLeeds – United!
Colin Welland delves into a favourite subject of Play for Today writers, industrial relations, with a look at a strike in a Leeds clothing factory which took place just a few years previously. With a cast of hundreds and a budget well into six figures, it was at the time the most lavishly produced single British drama (Kenith Trodd at the helm, Roy Battersby directing). Reviled on transmission by local press and unions for misrepresentation of both the area and the workforce, its sympathies clearly lie with the workers as people, torn between the exploitation of the bosses and the self-interest of the union leaders.
Stocker’s Copper
By Tom Clarke. Gareth Thomas gets his big break as the titular riot policeman sent down to help control the Cornish clay miner’s strike of 1913, and becoming friendly with the miner he is sharing a house with, leading to inevitable conflicts when the strike turns nasty.
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Rank and File, The
Hot-off-the-press account by Jim Allen of the St Helens Pilkington Glass factory workers’ strike of the previous year from the eternally committed Allen, covering the work of the Rank and File Strike Committee (headed up by Peter Kerrigan) and their betrayal by union leaders in London. Allen came to write this play when he took a copy of his Wednesday Play The Big Flame round to the factory to show to workers, and was cornered by an old glassworker who showed him the grisly injuries of his trade and told him he’d been summarily dismissed after fifty years loyal service for refusing to cross picket lines, and had his pension taken away. Allen remarked “He’d got me by the bollocks, hadn’t he?” Allen himself found the dramatisation wanting, and later dismissed this play as “a lantern lecture,“ inferior to his more fictional The Big Flame, though for such a quick reaction to real events, it‘s far from the failure he claimed. Directed, as ever, by Ken Loach.
Creamguide's Pick of the Day
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Trad Jazz Britannia
Friday, 21.00, BBC4It always amuses us when we see clips of Double Your Money and notice the category board includes both “jazz (traditional)” and “jazz (modern)”, though it is true that at that point trad really was big news, the nascent Pick of the Pops spinning off from Trad Tavern being just one example of its hold on the nation’s teens in the early sixties, despite it being influenced by music some forty years old at the time.
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