Striking miners had then been attempting to stop convoys of lorries taking coal to Llanwern steelworks.
The facts of the actual strike are jettisoned in favour of a ticking-clock climax whereby Scargill/Pacino must race to parliament on a motorbike and make a tear-jerking speech before the miners blow up Sellafield.
"The idea of unions seemed to me as old-fashioned as flares or the penny farthing," admits Stephen Beresford, who wrote Pride after hearing the true story of the Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners group (LGSM).
These days, the best Hollywood can offer these is indulgent critiques of capitalism such as The Wolf of Wall Street, or David-and-Goliath issue movies such as Silkwood (starring Meryl Streep), or North Country, in which Charlize Theron proved women can be coal miners and have a perfect complexion.
eead8e82-be88-417b-8ec2-9087b693cd66 With the death of the former miners' leader Peter Heathfield the labour and trade union movement has lost one of its most courageous leaders.
The place that was built by miners, a community nestled in high black walls of mullock from more than 100 years of digging ore out of the ground.
If you have never been, you can probably still imagine the main street, wide verandahs, rows of heritage buildings and tributes to miners long dead and still toiling.
The restlessness of youth, the landscape of the north, parents, class, the 1984 miners' strike (over long before she was born), and peripheral glimpses of the animal world are some of the poetic concerns of a collection that never becomes parochial or narrowly autobiographical.
My favourites this year include Ballad of the Miners' Strike (March, Radio 2), a hugely moving and important testimony woven with folk music, archive clips and much warmth.
As he said, every previous Yorkshire miners' MP had retired with honour.
The first came in July 1984, when Britain's dockers joined the miners on strike.
