Hillsborough

Your child goes to a football match. He comes home in a coffin. So do 95 others, crushed to death because of a series of blunders by those supposed to ensure his safety: the police. Rather than face their responsibility, the police treat with you an insensitivity bordering on callousness. Then they try to shift blame – on to the football supporters themselves. Drunken, ticketless fans were the prime cause of the disaster, they say. How much would your child have had to drink, they ask. They plant newspaper stories falsely claiming that drunken fans urinated on the dead, and stole from the corpses. When they are held overwhelmingly responsible for the disaster in a judicial inquiry, they try again to shift the blame in the inquest. Drunkeness and hooliganism become the myth: “accidental death” the verdict. You then spend seven years defending your dead child. An impossible nightmare? No. “Hillsborough”, a drama-documentary written by BAFTA Award winner Jimmy McGovern, tells a true story of anger and injustice – a remarkable film produced at the request of the families themselves. It reveals new evidence about England´s worst sporting disaster – within hours of transmission the Home Secretary agreed to listen to calls for a new inquiry and the coroner conceded he could have been mistaken.