If Labour is taking us back to the 1970s – and the recent strike-secured pay rises and mass rage about immigration suggest more than a nodding similarity between our own time and that one – anyone wanting a deeper insight could do no better than watch Bill Brand. This 11-part series, written by playwright Trevor Griffiths (who died earlier this year) and broadcast by ITV in 1976, explores the working and personal life of a newly elected Labour MP, and was once called by the Sunday Times ‘the most remarkable series ever seen on the box’.

Bill Brand, played by Jack Shepherd, is on the hard left of Labour, the kind of MP Kinnock and Blair did so much to eject from the party in the 80s and 90s (and who made something of a comeback under Jeremy Corbyn’s doomed tenure). ‘I actually believe in public ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange,’ he tells an interviewer, ‘…in workers’ control over work, community control over the environment.’

This is a series in which huge moral issues seem at stake and worlds in danger of toppling

This puts him on a collision course with the bulk of his colleagues and the Whips’ office, who tell him to his face he’s ‘quite a little shit’ and knuckle down for a war of attrition with him. Over the course of a year we watch him take part in industrial action, get into scrapes with his local party, alienate nearly everyone with a speech which seems to defend the IRA and fight like mad for the dying textile trade in his constituency.

If this sounds dull, it’s anything but. There may be a lot about the daily grind of parliamentary procedure – too much, perhaps, for some viewers. Yet few series have more sense of passion and conflict, the innate........

© The Spectator