Hillsborough [DVD] [1996]

I remember vividly watching the events of Hillsborough on TV in 1989, which had a huge impact on my 14-year-old self, and remember watching this drama-documentary when it was first transmitted in 1996. Jimmy McGovern captures the excitement for those attending the match, which quickly turned to tragedy and then the subsequent anger as the authorities treat the victims and their families appallingly, partly to cover up their pathetic behaviour during and after that horrible day.

The acting is uniformly excellent. It's one of the programmes I would use as an example of why TV is as much an artform as film or music. Highly recommended, with one small mention that this isn't the complete version that transmitted on ITV in 1996. There is a section missing, which dealt with the coroner's conclusion as to when all the victims were clinically dead. He said it was 3:15pm, even though police witnesses and paramedics had testified that some victims were still alive well past that time. There was originally a scene with an investigator calling a policeman asking him to "confirm" his story about his dealing with a victim who he said was still alive near 4pm. Apparently, the actual coroner was unhappy with this section, and his portrayal during the inquest, and the scene was removed from subsequent showings (including the repeat on ITV3 this year for the 20th anniversary).

It's a shame it isn't the complete uncut 1996 version, but I'd assume Network DVD will only be able to release the version ITV is willing to authorise, so it's not their fault, and that it's available at all is still reason to celebrate.

I did not see the tragedy as it began to unfold at Hillsborough but I can vividly remember being shocked when it began to appear on news flashes soon afterwards and the memory of these scenes has stayed with me ever since. The film brilliantly reconstructs how an ordinary day for a group of people who go to a football match or stay at home to watch it on television becomes a nightmare of panic, uncertainty and anger as first the people are caught up in the crush, then their relatives at home suffer the agony of not knowing if they survived and then the survivors and their relatives having to cope with realising how badly the emergency was handled by the authorities. Particularly galling is the knowledge by some relatives that their loved ones who died that dreadful day could have been saved if the rescue had been better organised by those who were charged with the responsibility of doing this.

The acting is uniformally fine by the cast, their portrayal of how families would feel in these circumstances is superbly conveyed and the scenes of what happened afterwards when the enquiry took place is particularly well done. You could really feel their frustration and rage as the full extent of the failures of the authorities and their refusal to acknowledge them became apparent.

As with many tragedies lessons were learnt and football grounds were made safer and the authorities are now, hopefully, better at dealing with such emergencies. I only hope that it does not take another Hillsborough for us to find out differently.

David Rowland

In hindsight, Jimmy McGovern's Hillsborough is possibly a little over-rated, as it doesn't exactly go out of its way to let the audience draw its own conclusions about (undoubtedly) one of the most flagrant instances of British legal corruption in the Twentieth Century. But even if its message could have been stated a little more subtly, it was probably for the best that it wasn't, given the then-widespread misunderstanding of what happened on April 15th 1989. The Disaster had been badly and cynically misportrayed in the media and in Government for over seven years by the time the docu-drama was made, and correcting for this had to be the first priority. That the film had to be made at all was a tragedy in its own right, and over-rated or not, it is still one of the great British docu-dramas.

It is undeniably harrowing, effective viewing, acted with great realism by a gifted and knowledgeable cast; a very young Christopher Eccleston portrays Trevor Hicks so convincingly, for instance, that it's easy to miss that he was probably TOO young, while Ricky Tomlinson, as John Glover, shows he can do drama at least as effectively as he can do parody.

Every time I watch the film I well up, alternately wanting to cry at the needless loss of life, and shaking with the same powerless rage that the families of the Disaster's victims forever feel, in the face of the bungling and mendacity of the South Yorkshire Police force, and the heartless indifference of the Thatcher/Major Government. (How sad that the likes of Paul Middup, Irvine Patnick and Bernard Ingham weren't given the 'treatment' in this as well.)

Most of the scenes portraying the unfolding Disaster are remarkably well done given budget limits, although the reconstruction of the Leppings Lane terrace is a bit obvious. But what stands out above all is the very accurately bleak, almost insidious atmosphere. That 96 lives could be lost through such casual negligence, and that grieving relatives of the victims could be treated with such callous disregard, provide the bleakness; that such insensitive and cowardly attempts to obscure the causes could occur provides the insidiousness.

Sadly, the cut of the film that appears on this DVD has been significantly abridged (costing it a star in my rating); scenes showing medical information being falsified before submission to the Coroner's Inquests - including an officer being pressured into changing his statement - have been excised.

In the years after the film was made, it was discovered that the South Yorkshire Police had edited over one hundred and eighty statements that their officers had written for submission to the Inquiry into the Disaster. The edits were trying to play down reference to the poor performance of the match commanders and to play up references to supposed crowd misbehaviour. One is given to wonder what extra impact the film would have had, were these additional details known then. Between the 'mysterious disappearance' of two CCTV tapes from the stadium control room during the evening after the crush, the untrue assertion that one of the CCTV cameras covering pens 3 & 4 on Leppings Lane was malfunctioning, the pressuring of several key witnesses to change their stories, the editing of official witness statements, the incorrect imposition of a 3:15pm 'cut-off' time for information from the day of the Disaster to be considered valid at the Coroner's Inquests, and the persistent smear campaign against the Liverpool supporters in the media, the Hillsborough cover-up should be seen as one of the most vile legal scandals in living memory. How no one in the SYP has ever been convicted over the cover-up (to say nothing of over the Disaster itself) is an indictment of the British judicial system.