The Mill

I kind of liked the series of The Mill that finished airing last Sunday. Based around the life of a textile mill at Cheshire in the late 1830s and early 1840s, this dealt with the peak in Chartist activity around the petition of 1842, and participation of mill workers in the General Strike of that year. This was presented sympathetically (if anything, a little too sympathetically - would that all members of the ruling class were classic villains, and all union supporters basically solid people), and with a good understanding of the underlying politics. It doesn't represent a high point of writing, it was frequently predictable, and often unhelpfully sentimental. Nevertheless, it's good that stuff like this is being made.

However, the sadness is that it is perfectly safe to approach Britain's most radical mass working class movement through the lens of historical drama. The past, with its funny costumes and improbable background music, is a foreign country that can be served up in commodified dollops without there being much danger of many viewers' attitudes towards their own situation being changed. For sure, we might admire the passion, the commitment, the values of a revolutionary in a drama series, but the feelings thus stirred are easily packaged up and consigned to the domain of nostalgia - oh for the days when people believed in something.

The challenge is to provide a way of approaching radical history that presents it as part of an unfinished story in which we ourselves participate.