The Ballad of the Miners' Strike – March 2010

Following the 2006 Radio Ballads series, a new Ballad was commissioned for transmission in March 2010. The Ballad of the Miners' Strike revisits the bitter year-long dispute in words and specially-commissioned song in a programme to mark the 25th anniversary of its end.

Striking miners and their wives, police and miners who worked reflect on picket lines, food parcels, police states, Scargill vs Thatcher and Orgreave.  As one man puts it: “It’s the closest thing we’ve had to a Civil War in Britian since 1641-49.”

Judas Bus, Over in a Fortnight, Ordinary Copper and Beyond the Picket Line are just four of the new songs inspired by the interviews heard in this programme and written by Ballad songwriters Jez Lowe, John Tams, Ray Hearne and Julie Matthews.

With a rich tapestry of archive news and a seamless musical backing provided by top folk musicians Andy Seward, Neil Yates and Andy Cutting, this is a beautiful, poignant and very emotional programme. As miners reflect on the inevitability of a cruel defeat, their wives discover they have been empowered by the process, and are not now the people they were when the strike began.

See BBC programme information at BBC Radio 2 online.

THE BBC RADIO BALLADS 2006

"The best radio of 2006" – Gillian Reynolds, Daily Telegraph
"Public service broadcasting at its very finest" – Music Week

The 2006 Radio Ballads series was an ambitious documentary and songwriting project to update the 'radio ballad' techniques of Ewan MacColl and Charles Parker, and apply them to 21st century issues.

The original Radio Ballads were broadcast in the late 1950s/early 1960s and considered a seminal documentary series in radio history. MacColl and Parker conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with people involved in the building of Britain's motorways and the fishing industry, with coalminers, boxers, travellers, teenagers and people living with polio; people whose voices were not ordinarily heard on the BBC.

Well aware of the giant footsteps they were walking in, the Smooth Operations team adopted the original principles and updated the approach for the modern era, developing a seamless transition between speech, song and atmosphere, telling powerful stories without the intrusion of a narrator.

Executive producer John Leonard and musical director John Tams assembled some of the finest names in contemporary folk music to write songs based on interviews gathered on six new subjects: the decline of the steel and shipbuilding industries, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the ban on hunting with hounds, the lives of Britain's fairground communities and people living with HIV/AIDS.

The songwriting team included Julie Matthews, Jez Lowe, Karine Polwart, Tommy Sands and John Tams, with musicians John McCusker, Andy Cutting, Graeme Taylor, Mike McGoldrick and Andy Seward providing superb backing for singers Bob Fox, Barry Coope, Cara Dillon, Kellie While, Chris While and Kate Rusby.

From the deeply personal stories gathered by interviewers Vince Hunt and Sara Parker, the team wrote more than 60 poignant songs for the six-part series. The 2006 Radio Ballads was broadcast on BBC Radio 2 between February and April 2006, and repeated over the Christmas holiday.

A stage version of the Ballads was commissioned in January 2007 by Glasgow's Celtic Connections festival. Highlights of the live show – which featured the full 2006 Ballads company and received a standing ovation – were broadcast on BBC Radio 2 in 2008.

Smooth Operations produced an in-depth Radio Ballads website accompanying the series for Radio 2. It features historical and educational links, details of the documentary process, galleries, speech clips and video, as well as extracts of the original Ballads of MacColl, Parker and Peggy Seeger.

All of the 2006 Radio Ballads, including a compilation of the series' songs, are available on CD. Please email Smooth Operations for further details.