Miners' Strike: The Frontline Story, BBC Two, review: forty years have made it no less devastating

miners' strike: the frontline story, bbc two, review: forty years have made it no less devastating

Dave Roper worked as a miner in South Yorkshire – BBC

There is one section in Miners’ Strike: A Frontline Story (BBC Two) that will bring you up short. Dave Roper was a South Yorkshire miner when his baby son died at a week old. With no wages coming in, he applied for a funeral grant. It was denied because he was on strike.

The undertaker told him there was a solution: to bury the baby in someone else’s coffin. A willing family was found, but Roper and his wife couldn’t bring themselves to attend. “I’d have to attend someone else’s funeral,” Roper said. “And they’ll think, ‘That’s them that can’t afford a funeral.’ So a bit of pride stopped me going.” Tough as old boots, Roper doesn’t cry when he recounts this. But when he says “the bastard Tories” you can feel the weight of emotion behind it.

Channel 4 stole a march on the BBC last month by releasing its own, very good documentary on the 1984-85 miners’ strike. The BBC version is similar: a mix of archive footage (pickets yelling “scab” at working miners, police brutality at Orgreave) and contemporary interviews. The Channel 4 programme, across three episodes, offered a more rounded picture. It included interviews with former aides to Margaret Thatcher, and NUM executives who provided insights into Arthur Scargill’s tactics.

A Frontline Story relies on the accounts of miners from both sides of the divide, along with the women involved, plus contributions from officers who policed the strikes. Their words have power, because their feelings – anger, pride, heartbreak – remain so strong. There are the two brothers, one who went back to work and one who stayed out on strike, whose relationship has never recovered.

The man still mentally scarred by the experience of being beaten so hard by a police officer that the truncheon broke in two (an attack captured on camera). The woman who ran a soup kitchen using whatever meat could be found and would tell people: “You might find some teeth in it. Don’t swallow them. And don’t complain. It’s a dinner.”

Everyone here laments the television news coverage of the time, which they perceived as pro-police and government. Here they can tell their side of the story, to an audience in which many people will not have an innate understanding of these working-class communities.

There is one funny recollection about a Cambridge University feminist group coming to Nottinghamshire to do a play about the strike. They ended by covering their faces in mock coal dust and declaring: “One day, the women will unite and work side by side down the pits with their men”. Middle-class cluelessness at its worst.

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