Chris Nineham makes his selection of the best programmes to watch over the Christmas period

Industry

Mikey Down, Konrad Kay, 2024
BBC i-player

Most dramas about work sidestep the often abusive relationship between managers and staff. The HBO/BBC series Industry puts it centre stage. A tale of trauma and mistreatment at a big London investment bank brilliantly written by two former bankers, Industry follows a group of graduates competing for permanent positions as brokers and partying along the way. In the process, it shows how bullying, ambition and huge amounts of cash darken or destroy their lives. Series three and four, which came out this year, can be watched on their own. The script is sharp, the acting is outstanding. The ironically-titled Industry is haunted by the meaninglessness of shifting billions of pounds around the globe in search of casino profit.

Sing Sing

Greg Kwedar, 2023
Prime Video

A story of how an arts rehabilitation programme changes the lives of inmates at a US maximum security prison might sound sentimental. But centred around a superb performance by Colman Domingo as a man wrongly imprisoned for murder, and featuring a cast of mainly former prisoners (many of whom were part of such a project), it raises issues of racism, loneliness and incarceration to the level of poetry. Simply by being set in a prison, the film avoids easy ideas of redemption through art, but instead asks surprising questions about creativity, expectations and how people are shaped by the world they live in.

Strike: An Uncivil War

Daniel Gordon 2024
Netflix

Daniel Gordon’s riveting documentary about the 1984-5 British Miner’s strike centres around the Battle of Orgreave when miners tried to close a coke works with mass pickets to impact on the wider economy. This was a good decision. Orgreave was the tipping point in a strike that was a decisive moment in British history. It means that the film goes to the heart of the strategic issues of the strike on both sides and is an education-in-class struggle. The story is told through in-depth interviews with rank-and-file miners whose intelligence, courage and continued commitment to the cause of social change is deeply moving.

Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light

Peter Kosminsky, 2024
BBC i-Player

This is the third and final series of Wolf Hall, about the life of Thomas Cromwell, long-term senior minister to Henry VIII and a key figure in the English Reformation. It brings together the outstanding talents of novelist Hilary Mantel, director Peter Kosminsky and actor Mark Rylance. The result is a drama that grasps history as a conflict of social forces but is powered by a completely convincing set of personal relations. The new season takes up the story of the forward-looking Thomas Cromwell from the peak of his power to his fall at the hands of a jealous and reactionary class of nobles. 

Gaza

Garry Keane and Andrew McConnell, 2019
Prime Video

Made in 2019 almost by accident by Irish filmmakers Garry Keane and Andrew McConnell, Gaza is a sad, angry and beautiful depiction of the extraordinary lives of Gazans in what Israel had already turned into a disaster zone. Its relatively slow rhythms reveal the eloquence and resilience of people searching for a better world in appalling circumstances. The carnage of the last fifteen months has of course given the film an almost overwhelming emotional and political charge. It is as near as you could come to a suitable tribute to a people at the centre of an unspeakable firestorm.