THE PEOPLE’S HISTORY SHOW, STV, 8pm
THE Grenfell disaster was horrific, but beside the misery of seeing families killed and the agonising sense that the tragedy was preventable, was the eerie discomfort it brought: we live in a modern age of health and safety, we thought, and such disasters were surely confined to the past. We all remembered other traumatic events in living memory and they each seemed to be back in the 70s and 80s: Hillsborough, the Bradford Fire, the Kings Cross Fire.
In remembering these disasters, not many people seemed to recall the Clarkston gas explosion, and this programme takes us back to that terrible day in 1971 when 22 were killed and over 100 injured.
Historian Fergus Sutherland tells the awful story and speaks to eyewitnesses and survivors. We see how the emergency services sprang into action, with nurses climbing into the wreckage to treat the wounded.
LABOUR: THE SUMMER THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING, BBC2, 9pm
THIS documentary looks back to the summer of Corbynmania, when the Labour lefties beamed and congratulated themselves on electing “Jez”, but most others shuddered at how the party had seemingly learned nothing from their 1980s wilderness years, and how Corbyn’s leadership looked likely to condemn us all to years of Conservative rule at Westminster.
In this period, “the Tories can hardly believe their luck”, and so Theresa May calls a snap election, probably thinking she’ll grab seats all over the place, but she runs an atrocious campaign, with one MP calling her various U-turns “a plate of sick.”
This film follows four Labour MPs through that election campaign — including Stephen Kinnock and Sarah Champion — and onwards into the aftermath which saw Corbynites seem pleased with the result, even though they lost.
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