It’s always grim Oop North on t’ BBC ...

HISTORY is supposed to be written by the winners. But that’s not always the case when it comes to the Thatcher years, which are routinely portrayed as some kind of Dark Ages presided over by a fascist regime.

Revisionism is the order of the day, especially at the BBC. We’ve become accustomed to the Corporation’s news, current affairs and drama output dressing to the Left.

Now, though, even the ‘reality’ programmes are following the same Guardianista agenda. This week I caught up with a show called Back In Time For Tea, on BBC 2.

To be honest, it’s not the kind of thing I’d normally bother with. My interest was piqued by a blog on the Spectator magazine website, written by Ross Clark.

The series features a typical family from Bradford, who are transported back in time to experience life in different decades of the 20th century.

It’s billed as a food programme, featuring dishes from down the years, illustrating how our tastes have changed and become more sophisticated. This gives the kids a chance to turn up their noses at everything from tripe to treacle pudding.

But politics is never far from the surface. So it proved this week, when Dad was transformed into a striking coal miner and Mum was told she was losing her job as a dinner lady because the Tories had privatised school catering.

As the strike, which began in 1984, progresses, the family’s car, sofa and washing machine are all repossessed because they can’t keep up the repayments.

Mum goes to the cupboard, but there’s nothing there, save for a mouldy old loaf and a symbolic bit of hard cheddar. We’re talking Old Mother Hubbard here.

DESPITEthe hardship, Mum explains to the children that it’s worth it because they’re ‘taking a stand’ against the wicked Tories. The kids are encouraged to wear ‘Coal Not Dole’ lapel badges.

Here we go, here we go, here we go!

Fortunately, help is at hand in the form of food parcels from the Soviet Union. The family is saved from starvation by tins of beans from Hungary and beef from Russia.

You couldn’t make it up. Actually, you don’t have to. Distributing food parcels from the Communist bloc was one of the more cynical stunts pulled by the strike organisers and their supporters.

The voiceover states that in the Eighties, Britain was more divided than at any time since the Thirties. Soup kitchens popped up in Bradford for the first time in 60 years.

An ex-miner was wheeled on to declare, with tears in his eyes, that he’d do it all over again. (Cue the Brighouse and Rastrick brass band.)

What’s utterly lacking is any pretence of balance, either political or historical. Viewers are informed that the strike was over the closure of coal mines, including the one where the Bradford Dad allegedly worked.

That’s not strictly accurate. By the Eighties, there were no pits open in the Bradford area. The last one on the outskirts of the city closed as long ago as 1950, under Clement Attlee’s Labour government. In fact, far more mines were shut down under Labour than the Tories. This inconvenient truth is conveniently ignored. So when the ex-miner says he was fighting for the jobs of future generations, it’s a fantasy.

Coal was dying long before Thatcher entered Downing Street in 1979. The pits would have closed anyway. All the strike did was hasten their demise.

What viewers were not told, either, is that miners’ leader Arthur Scargill called the strike without holding a national ballot and enforced it using violent flying pickets.

It was never about saving coal mines, it was about bringing down a democratically elected Conservative government. There was revolution in the air.

It wasn’t Communist bloc food parcels which helped keep the strike going, it was Moscow Gold — money funnelled to the National Union of Mineworkers from Russia and Colonel Gaddafi’s Soviet satellite Libya.

(I remember one of the bagmen, the late Ken Cameron, leader of the firemen’s union, leaving a satchel full of dodgy dosh in a Westminster boozer after stopping off for a few large scotches before catching a train to the NUM headquarters in Barnsley. He had to get a cab back from King’s Cross station to retrieve it.)

Meanwhile, Back In Time, when the strike collapses after a year, Dad finds himself out of work. He receives a letter from the Government offering him £40 a week to become self-employed, by starting his own hot-potato business.

Dad thinks it’s a bit of a comedown from working down t’pit. For the record, I understand the dignity of labour argument, but ask yourself this: would you rather sell hot potatoes in a warm shopping centre, or crawl on your hands and knees breathing in coal dust hundreds of feet underground?

Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but this looked to me like a sideways swipe at the origins of today’s free-booting, Uber- style gig economy.

BYTHE time the programme moved on to the awful fire at Bradford City football ground, which claimed 56 lives, I switched off before they could make the inevitable Grenfell Tower parallels.

There was clearly a good series trying to get out here, but the producers couldn’t resist their statutory metropolitan, anti-Tory, anti-Thatcher moralising.

This is obviously what life Oop North looks like to Corbynista BBC types, most of whom have probably never been further north than Hampstead.

The modern Left love to romanticise the miners. But they also hate coal, because of the harm coal-fired power stations do to the ozone layer.

If the Tories hadn’t closed the pits, Labour and the Green lobby would have got round to it eventually.

So if you do catch up with Back In Time For Tea on the iPlayer, take it with a pinch of salt.

Tripe, anyone?