“Your gays have arrived!”
Set during the Miners’ Strike of 1984, this inspirational BBC film includes one of the exclamations of the year at the heart of a true story about a minority group which randomly chose a small Welsh community to support financially.
With the characters’ resisting the initial reaction to their then unfashionable sexual pride, the result three decades later is a film infused with the pathos of Pete Postlethwaite’s Brassed Off (1996) and blessed with the fun of Robert Carlyle’s The Full Monty (1997).
The ensemble cast includes Paddy Considine, Bill Nighy and Imelda Staunton on top form at the heart of a modern yet quintessentially British movie.
One in which sexual repression is rebutted on the anvil of angry industrial relations.
And where there’s a common belief that David really can take on Goliath for the greater good of society.
Most films trying to tackle a quiet revolution of this significance would have been more uptight than a pair of cast-iron undies, but Pride is sensitive enough to trigger a range of emotions in all viewers.
