A teacher in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys says that “there is no period so remote as the recent past”, suggesting that such events are caught between the fallible memories of those involved and the ignorance of those not yet taught about them at school.
That problem was visible at In the Print, Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky’s docudrama about the 1986-87 stand-off between Rupert Murdoch, aiming to reform newspaper production, and Brenda Dean, general secretary of the print union Sogat (the Society of Graphical and Allied Trades). Theatregoers ranged from Lord Kinnock – Labour party leader at the time depicted – to viewers barely born when Murdoch’s News of the World ceased publication in 2011.
