How strange and unnerving to find that television is now being made about times I can actually remember. This week, Channel 4 will screen the final part of its excellent series Miners’ Strike 1984: The Battle For Britain, and, though I’ve seen it once already (critic’s perks), I may have to watch it all over again, the better to match up the fuzzy home movies in my head with the footage its director, Tom Barrow, has dragged from the archives.
It was a painful year, grey and sad. But my memories of 1984 are also, at a distance, slightly comical. On our side of Sheffield, famous for its trees and big Victorian houses, solidarity with the men was outwardly sincere – until, that is, a wild rumour went round that the president of the National Union of Mineworkers, Arthur Scargill, was house-hunting in the area, at which point some people had a bad attack of the vapours. Our teachers, no strangers to strikes themselves, were totally on board, of course. Even before the miners walked out, their idea of a really good school trip was to a pit shaft – and, frankly, we agreed: the cage that took us down, our helmets and lamps at a (we fancied) fashionably jaunty angle, combined with the near-darkness below to facilitate the best flirting opportunities we’d ever had while under their supervision.
The thesis of Channel 4’s series is that the strike changed Britain for ever, and I’m sure this is so. But it didn’t feel like it at the time, not least because the NUM’s sleek new HQ, aka Arthur’s Castle, rose up long after the strike was over: a phoenix of glass and concrete that came complete with a four-tonne marble frieze of two noble, half-naked miners. It now houses an accountancy firm and the kind of bars in which no ex-miner would be seen dead.
Heart of glass
To Two Temple Place, the house on the Thames once owned by William Waldorf Astor, for its annual exhibition, this year devoted to British glass-making. I expected to love it, and I did. But while it was uplifting, on a cold winter’s afternoon, to be so close to jewel-coloured stained glass by such geniuses as Edward Burne-Jones and Christopher Whall, the piece I liked best was contemporary: Monster Chetwynd’s barmy-looking, three-dimensional St Bede Enters the Monastery (2022). My mum, who’s from Sunderland, once the UK’s glass-making heart, and who went to a school called St Bede’s, was somewhat flummoxed later that day to receive a sudden flurry of photographs of a miniature glass saint standing beside a verdant bed of even tinier glass leeks.
Priceless theatre
Poor Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick. They bring their smash hit Broadway production of Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite to the Savoy Theatre in London, and all the pesky critics do is moan about the cost of tickets (they rise to £200 in the dress circle). Like they have to pay for them! Well, I have shelled out, albeit not to the tune of top whack. I couldn’t bear to miss it. As a sixth-former, I played Mimsy in an am-dram production of Plaza Suite that ran for four glorious nights at Sheffield’s Library Theatre. It was a great part, though it hardly set me up for life’s disappointments. All I had to do was stick on a Pronuptia wedding dress (full veil, plastic posy) and crouch behind a scenery door for 40 minutes. On cue, I then emerged to say my only line. The applause, born of surprise (and possibly relief) was always, to my young ears, completely rapturous.
• Rachel Cooke is an Observer columnist
