All our miners suffered, whether they worked or not
Iwas a child during the Miners’ Strike, and found it confusing. On the news were scenes of miners clashing with police, their families struggling by without money. My grandfather was by then retired but formerly a proud Co Durham miner. Yet his fiercest anger was directed not at Margaret Thatcher, or the officers dealing out truncheon blows, but at the miners’ champion, Arthur Scargill. How could that be?
Of course, I grew up to learn that it wasn’t a simple case of two sides. Miners’ Strike 1984: The Battle for Britain (Channel 4) details the schism between Scargill’s men and those who, in the absence of a national ballot, wanted to go to work.
This is a well-researched documentary, featuring miners who were in news footage from the time. Both sides are given equal weight.
It is split into three episodes. The first, Community, maps the bitter divisions in Shirebrook, Derbyshire. The BBC’S excellent 2022 drama, Sherwood, was set somewhere similar. Forty years on, positions are as fixed as ever: “If you cross a picket line,” says one man firmly, “you’re a scab.”
Working miners faced hatred. Miners bussed through the picket lines wore bags over their heads to hide their faces, or crash helmets in case of missiles. Sometimes it was women and children screaming abuse as they passed. Striking miners faced the police. In Derbyshire, officers wielded batons but that was nothing compared to the “Battle of Orgreave” in South Yorkshire, subject of episode two.
Mostly this is told by the miners arrested that day and the lawyers – inevitably, it’s Michael Mansfield QC and Gareth Peirce – who defended them. This episode relies on their testimonies and on powerful footage shot at the time, showing mounted police charges and violent scenes. The third episode brings a change of pace as it details the involvement of David Hart, a strange-sounding figure who appointed himself as adviser to the PM on how to end the strikes.
Former aides to Mrs Thatcher defend her position, but the film is very much on the miners’ side. Some loved being down the pit; others described it as hard, filthy work. But it was work. “The working man doesn’t want vast amounts of money. The working man’s not idle,” says a former NUM delegate. “All he wants to do is go to work, have enough money to go out and have a drink, for the wife and kids to be all right, to go away for a couple of weeks in the summer.” In former mining communities, those days are gone. Anita Singh
After a decade chewing lumps out of her Colombian accent as Modern Family’s comedy glamourpuss Gloria, it’s easy to see why Sofía Vergara would be keen to get her teeth into a meatier role. Step forward notorious “Cocaine Godmother” Griselda Blanco, very much the yin to Gloria’s yang.
Sporting a dodgy prostheticenhanced look designed to ugly down her image – it doesn’t really work, Vergara still looks fabulous, albeit a bit bizarre – Vergara is offered plenty of scope for showing off her dramatic chops in the full-throttle Griselda (Netflix). Careering through a life story littered with broken relationships, fortunes won and lost, deals brokered and broken, Vergara gets a full acting fix charting Blanco’s journey from savvy schemer to paranoid contract killer.
But, boy, is it bloody: the body count is extraordinarily high and there’s the rub. At the start of this six-part series it’s not hard to get on side with Blanco as we meet a much-wronged woman determined to make her mark in the macho, Colombian drug-dealing world. She’s doing it for her kids, she says, she’s doing it for women – hell, she’s even doing it for the downtrodden Latinos she enlists to work for her.
However, her ruthless nature soon rises to the surface. She’s doing it for greed and anyone who gets in her way has a habit of winding up dead. We’ve been rooting for a nasty piece of work.
Griselda is essentially a companion piece to Narcos, the acclaimed Netflix series charting the career of another drug legend, Pablo Escobar. Creative team Doug Miro and Ingrid Escajeda clearly know their double-dealing turf, adeptly navigating us through a shoot-’em-up world that feels both exhausting and empty.
The odd bit of comedy brings much needed light to the shade – a Spanish version of Laura Branigan’s 1980s classic Gloria cheekily pops up on the soundtrack as Blanco cruises down the freeway – but while Vergara gives it her all, she can never make us truly care about a character so morally hollow at the core. For all its highs,
Griselda is ultimately a bit of a downer. Keith Watson
Miners’ Strike 1984 ★★★★ Griselda ★★