The 40th anniversary of Britain’s biggest industrial dispute is ostensibly why Channel 4 is revisiting it with a three-part documentary. But as the subtitle of Miners’ Strike 1984: The Battle for Britain acknowledges, this is not ancient history. We are all living in the country where Margaret Thatcher won and the striking miners lost.
The series tells the story by formatting each episode as a standalone narrative zoomed in on a place or a moment and relayed by people who were directly involved, many of whom have not spoken before. How communities were irreparably divided by the dispute, and how intractable ideological differences ensured it would be bitter and long, is the theme of an opening instalment that places itself in Shirebrook, Derbyshire, where what is now the headquarters of Sports Direct was once a colliery at the heart of a buzzing mining town.
