A neat fantasy that asks why Britons don’t revolt: BBC1’s The Way reviewed 

‘The British don’t revolt, they grumble,’ said someone in the first episode of The Way. But what if we ever reversed this policy? That was the question posed by a drama that’s clearly a passion project for its director, Michael Sheen – and therefore set in Wales.

More specifically, The Way takes place in Port Talbot, the south Welsh town in which Sheen grew up and to which he moved back a few years ago, unexpectedly preferring it to LA. Or at least it takes place in a version of Port Talbot – because, perhaps necessarily for a show about a British revolution, there are hefty elements of the dream-like amid the realism.

At the centre of the programme, as of the town, are the steelworks – which as one character said (and recent real-life announcements have confirmed) are ‘always under threat’. Near the start, this threat suddenly became very real and, during a town meeting, the formidably matriarchal Dee called for pre-emptive industrial action, just like in the glory days of the General Strike and the miners’ fight of 1984.

Left to his own devices, I suspect Sheen would have been unequivocally in favour of mounting the barricades. Luckily, his choice of screenwriter here is James Graham, who specialises in winningly nuanced political dramas. As a result, Dee’s husband Geoff reminded her that both the strikes she mentioned had ended in cataclysmic, if predictable, defeat.

Later, in one of the more obviously dream-like moments, Geoff continued this argument with the ghost of his father Denny (played by Sheen), a miners’ leader in the 1980s and a local hero ever since. Denny, however, had committed suicide soon after his men lost, seemingly out of shame for believing in sentimental leftie nonsense.