Cultural highlights 2025: Strikes, Sheen, and Welsh storytelling

Carole Burns

 “I’m just an ordinary working-class woman and I’ve never done anything like this in my life.”

So says the wife of a striking miner in one of a series of short, independently made documentary films from the 1980s, re-shown at Chapter on 2 March to commemorate the 40^th anniversary of the end of the Miners’ Strike.

The three brief films shot and produced in the 1970s, also explored at the event by a panel that included former MP Sian James, were moving on many levels. As well as important historical footage of the strikes themselves, the project is a record of people, such as James, finding their political voice. At times, the miners see how their own battles are linked with other people’s causes, such as those involved in the Brixton “riots” a few years before – a lesson we all need to learn again and again. 

All three films, but especially “Rumours at the Miners’ Fortnight,” planned before the strike began, reflects, in its depiction of these families enjoying a holiday at Porthcawl, the extraordinary nature of ordinary lives. And the films themselves are expertly made, not at all slick but entirely authentic – they were part of a collaboration by Chapter Film and Video workshops, and won awards from BFI and the Celtic Film Festival.

This is a cultural highlight from 2025, but there’s a chance of catching another showing in 2026. The Chapter show was organized by Terence Dimmick and Chris Rushton, both videographers who helped lead the projects, and another event featuring other films in these series about the strike is being planned for Spring 2026 at the Welfare Hall, Ystradgynlais. 

Maybe this American is just catching up on her Welsh history, because my second cultural highlight is political in nature, too: the play Nye, starring Michael Sheen, which was on for a second run at the Wales Millennium Centre this August. Sheen is marvellous as Aneurin “Nye” Bevan, the Welshman who was chief architect of the NHS: argumentative, funny, sly, passionate, politically stubborn until Bevan sees that compromise, and more compromise, then even more, was the only path to getting an NHS. 

If it was tempting for playwright Tim Price to turn Bevan into a saint, he resisted; as Bevan, on his deathbed in an NHS hospital (Sheen spends the entire play in striped pyjamas), filters through his memories, again and again we see his sister berating him for not caring for their father, for leaving his filial duties to her; his own all-or-nothing dedication to his work also meant his wife, Jennie Lee, held back on her own political career (though she twice served as an MP and, after Bevan’s death, served as the first Minister for the Arts, playing a leading role in founding the Open University and expanding the Arts Council). 

One line from the play, from PM Clement Attlee, sticks in my mind: he tells Bevan that he’s decided to unite the Labour Party by giving the Left what they want – “For the good of the party. The good of the country. The good of the people.” I keep hoping Keir Starmer will go see a performance of Nye, and soon. 

Finally, reading and re-reading the novel Clear by Carys Davies, winner of the 2025 Wales Book of the Year Award, brought repeated rewards to my 2025 artistic life. As fiction judge this year, I read her elegant, beautiful novel several times, and was enraptured by its exploration of the need for human connection as a man who stayed alone on his Scottish islands during the Clearances forges a friendship with the man he does not realise was sent to evict him – with whom he does not even share a language.

Despite multiple reads, when I opened the book again a few months later to prepare for an interview with Carys for my “Writers in Conversation” reading series at the University of Southampton, then again to present the book to a book club, I intended to read just a few pages to job my memory. Instead, I found myself caught up in it again – the story, the characters, the language itself mesmerised me each time and kept me turning its pages once more.

What an honour to be chosen as the 2025 fiction judge, and what an honour to be able to choose this novel. 

Carole Burns is the author of The Same Country.