The miners’ strike has struck again. It’s the fortieth anniversary of the protracted dispute of 1984-85, which means that you have to be about my age (55) to have had anything approaching an adult understanding of it at the time.

The same old footage, the same old talking points, the same old grievances, excuses and myths regurgitated yet again

As you get older, and time speeds up to a quite ridiculous and frankly unacceptable degree, anniversaries start to whip by like stations on a non-stopping train. It only feels like ten minutes since the thirtieth anniversary of the strikes, and now we have to go through the whole thing all over again. That means more documentaries – we’ve already had The Miners’ Strike: A Frontline Story on the BBC and a three parter on Channel 4, Miners’ Strike 1984: The Battle for Britain. And more articles – with a long read in the Observer by Tim Adams this weekend about cultural depictions of the events. The same old footage, the same old talking points, the same old grievances, excuses and myths regurgitated yet again.

And my God, Adams has a lot of cultural depictions to work from. The miners’ strike is a rich vein beloved of TV and film commissioners – Billy Elliot, Pride, Brassed Off, Sherwood, etc. A friend of mine devised a parlour game where you take it in turns to give a short précis of a film or TV show and append the words ‘set against the emotive backdrop of the miners’ strike’. So for example, ‘In a galaxy far, far away a rebel alliance battles the evil Darth Vader, set against the emotive backdrop of the miners’ strike’ or ‘Holmes and Watson face their most baffling case at Baskerville Hall, set against the emotive backdrop of the miners’ strike.’

Creative types seem to enjoy getting maudlin and angry about this now distant event, though as I recall they were quite maudlin and angry about it at the time. I was at sixth form just outside London and my class was often sent to see plays in London as part of our theatre studies A level. At the end of every performance a little sigh went round our group as one of the actors would shuffle back on stage to have a rant about Thatcher and the Tories and pass a fundraising bucket round.

Even then there was something noticeably odd about this fetishisation of manual labour and the ‘working class community’ by often middle-class writers and actors. They seemed to be getting off on it all, of this idealised vision of honest back breaking toil traduced by a wicked Tory witch.

Then, as now, these people were never normally in the habit of taking much notice of what the working class had to say. We see this today. Many in the media who lionise the miners are the same folk who call the lower orders ‘racist gammon’ when they discuss mass immigration.

The romantic vision lingers in others ways too. The Observer piece contains the following – ‘Forty years on, two seconds of footage of Thatcher in any of the latest documentaries, repeating her determination to defeat “the enemy within”, or to defend liberty with battalions of riot police, should still come with a trigger warning to anyone who sat through those broadcasts in real time. The patronising grate of the voice, the impervious certainty, the hair … still have the effect of a thousand nails down a blackboard.’

Pass the smelling salts. Forty years on the bogeywoman retains the power to bring on conniptions in her detractors. And all should cry, beware beware! Her flashing eyes, her floating hair! The temerity of the woman, standing up firmly against attempts – often violent ones – to bring the country to its knees.

There is a certain strain of the progressive middle class who continue to blame Mrs Thatcher for everything that happened then and almost every development since, sometimes decades after she left office. Hilariously, many of these people are far too young to even remember her. There is a memetic idea among them that British life immediately before 1979 was a happier, more caring and sharing, generally more lovely place. This is very funny to anybody that actually recalls the perpetual aggro of the 1970s.

Perhaps in another 40 years there’ll be films and TV dramas – or whatever form visual entertainment takes in 2064 – rhapsodising over how cosy and contented Britain was in the 2020s, before the reign of nasty Mrs Badenoch and her heartless government. That would be equally ridiculous.

Still, in another ten minutes it’ll be time for the fiftieth anniversary of the miners’ strike. Get your pitches in now!