A Question of Leadership

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Shortly after Margaret Thatcher's election as prime minister, Ken Loach returned to documentary, convinced that the long gestation of feature films made them useless as instruments of topical social comment. But his trade union documentary A Question of Leadership, intended for national ITV broadcast, was criticised by the Independent Broadcasting Authority for its explicitly anti-government stance. It was eventually screened a year later, exclusively in the Midlands (tx. 13/8/1981). Believing that the then-new Channel 4 would be more amenable to politicised documentaries, Loach proposed the four-part Questions of Leadership (1983), a wider-ranging study of the trade union movement - but on viewing the completed programmes' strong criticism of leading trade unionists, an anxious Channel 4 shortened the series to two parts and proposed screening a 'balancing' documentary by a different filmmaker, before scrapping the broadcast altogether.