ABSTRACT
The Miner and the City Two days separated Death of a Miner and Towards Tomorrow: Super City? (both BBC-I). The titles indicated a past and a future, but the real bearings of both were the present. The strength of Death of a Miner was the talk of Jack and Emma Elliot, and of their family. It isn't often, on television, that we get working-class men and women talking as subjects, about the shapes of their lives, rather than as objects in a temporary dispute or a street interview. But it is then significant that we heard them when Jack Elliot had died, and when the pit in which he had worked was closing. This, I suppose, is what guided it to Sunday, where for an early-evening interval the religious programmes come and a detached reverence can be assumed. Yet there was nothing detached in what the Elliots had to say: this was the human reality of a continuing social experience which may be acceptable only on Sundays and about the past, but which is in fact weekday and contemporary: what is now happening to many hundreds of thousands of men. The worst letter anyone ever wrote to me was when I had published Border Country and, as an attempted compliment, Harry Price the signalman-strong, respected, dead-was held up as an example to the railway men who now made the correspondent late for the office. It is a familiar
orthodox pattern: dead workers, like dead radicals, can be seen as human beings; alive they are only instrumental and inconvenient. Philip Donnellan, who made Death of a Miner, did a very fine job, but it was others who put the frame round it, and the critic's job is to break it.
