Blood Red Roses

18/05/2026

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Blood Red Roses can seem like standard TV fare, a three-part drama covering a working-class woman’s life over thirty years, and her involvement in union politics. But, though there might be little to comment upon formally in this work made with the 7:84 theatre group, responsible for the rather more radical The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil, it has certain merits. Both were written by John McGrath, who may have had a history in radical theatre, but was also a writer and director who had worked in solid, standard TV, including Z Cars, a TV show Ken Loach was also involved with. He was a Liverpudlian who studied at Oxford, and his wife, Elizabeth MacLennan (who stars as the adult Bessie here), studied there too, was from a comfortably off family, and whose brother, David MacLennan, became a life peer. She and McGrath formed the 7:84 group together, along with David.
Are we talking about privileged people making works about those less so? That would be to simplify the backgrounds of McGrath and MacLennan, and to misconstrue the nature of the post-war consensus that created far more opportunities for people from various backgrounds than had been hitherto the case. McGrath could work commercially or radically, but that didn’t mean directing television was the same as selling out, any more than making work about the proletariat was a sign of condescension. This was the 1960s and the 1970s, when television was seen as a public good, and by the time Blood Red Roses came out, it was still being protected on channels like BBC 2 and Channel 4, the latter of which produced the programme. Working in TV wasn’t what McGrath did as an aesthetic retreat, but as a certain type of public advance: to help create the consciousness of a nation. Numerous other playwrights thought the same: David Mercer, John Osborne, Dennis Potter, and David Hare were amongst the most prominent of their age, and all wrote for television.
This is a good way to approach Blood Red Roses, as it examines unionisation in Britain, and specifically Scotland, in the post-war years.  Bessie’s mother goes off with a fancy man just before her father returns from military service. She tries to take Bessie with her, but Bessie is having none of it and waits for her father’s return. The scene shows Bessie is a woman who fights for what she believes in, and the rest of the episode and the other two follow her battles chiefly on a political level. Bessie isn’t quite a typical woman in post-war Scotland, but the programme does explore how, if someone wanted to fight, they had causes worth fighting for. Bessie initially takes on the school system as she questions lazy assumptions made about gender roles. And she doesn’t do it politely. When one of the teachers (a man of the cloth) talks about their flirtatious ways to ensnare a man, and then their womanly duties once married, Bessie says ‘‘shite’’, and ends up giving the man a forceful shove. Earlier, in gym class, the teacher says ‘‘there’s nothing special about you, Bessie Gordon, though you seem to think you’re very special indeed’’, and says she doesn’t want weaklings in her class. Bessie picks up a barbell, lifts it above her head, and suggests that the teacher try to do the same. It ends in a scrap that Bessie clearly wins, but is then given the strap by another teacher over the affair.
From one perspective, Bessie could be seen as a troublemaker: she answers the teachers back, and gets into fights, but the show makes clear it is usually others who want to oppress, and Bessie resists this oppression. It is the same when she enters the workplace, taking a few minutes off when her friend says she is unwell. As Bessie stands outside, her superior turns up and gives her a dressing down. Bessie isn’t one for buttering up and promptly apologising. She instead lectures the woman about the inadequacy of the ventilation when working with dangerous chemicals. McGrath proposes that Bessie has always been someone who fights injustice and sticks up for what she believes is right, but he also indicates that this is only as good as the collectivity that can back it. Bessie finds this in unionisation and politicisation, and it isn’t until later, in the 1980s, as Margaret Thatcher works to destroy the unions, that Bessie moves from a figure of autonomy to one of impotence.
She becomes one of Thatcher’s three million unemployed. She fights a losing battle defending 550 women from East Kilbride at her workplace, and against the encroachment of global capitalism and further automation. But the place where she works proves to be of little value to this company, now owned by an American multinational. As the boss says, they are building a factory in Cumbria that will have machines capable of doing more work in one day than all the women working in East Kilbride can produce in a week. During the exchange,  Bessie says that though the company has the power, Bessie and her colleagues have the motivation, as she asserts herself by moving a lamp on the table out of the way and speaks of the company as part of imperial and economic exploitation. She doesn’t quite realise that times were in the process of changing, and that Ronald Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK were central to a new world economic order: neo-liberal deregulation. This is where a combination of automated developments, offshoring employment, immigration, and banking deregulation would all contribute to greater profit, but immiserate communities.
Though today many make much of the immigration issue as a way of explaining the deteriorating economic circumstances of the working people, graphs show that during the 1980s and 1990s, when deregulation was its most pronounced, and many were losing their jobs, unemployment went from 4 per cent to 12 per cent, from 1979 to 1981, and only dipped to 4 per cent again in 2019 many were suffering. It seemed economic rather than immigration policies were causing the pain, as immigration in the 1980s stood at 6.6 in 1981, and 16.8 in 2019. Tejvan Pettinger notes that ‘‘Supporters of this ‘Thatcherite Revolution' argue the 1980s enabled the UK to tackle long-standing problems such as inflation, poor industrial relations and a relative economic decline. However, critics argue the recession of 1981 was unnecessarily severe, and the supply side reforms increased inequality – without any noticeable improvement in the long-run trend rate of economic growth.’’ (Economics Help) Blood Red Roses makes clear it wasn’t the influx of immigrants but the collapse of unionisation. Communities weren’t torn apart by foreigners in their midst but what Thatcher called the ‘enemy within’: ‘‘We had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands,’’ Thatcher said. ‘‘We always have to be aware of the enemy within, which is much more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty.’’ (BBC)
Blood Red Roses shows footage from both the Falklands War, which was central to Thatcher’s re-election, despite high unemployment, and the miners’ strike. The enemy within remark was about striking miners, and Blood Red Roses offers on TV a news report of a clash that became known as the Battle of Orgreave, where miners and the police fought bloodily in the village of the battle’s title. The footage shows the hard power of union crushing, while Bessie is a victim of its softer manifestation. She becomes blacklisted as a troublemaker, and even when she reverts to her maiden name, she is soon found out and is removed from her employment. She claims to her ex-husband, who turns out to be the union representative, that this is unfair dismissal, but as Alex makes clear, she doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on, and others are unlikely to fight her cause. They can sack her for blowing her nose in the first three months, he says, and she acknowledges that the notion of them and us, and working-class solidarity, has gone, with neo-liberal forces picking the workers off one by one.
Blood Red Roses represents diegetic failure, but it is contained within its own relative success. In other words, while the show, made in 1986, might have been shown during the height of Thatcherism, and the weakening of the workers’ ability to hold out against global capitalism, it nevertheless itself was made. This might seem like a token gesture next to the defeats taking place in mines, steelworks and other industrial companies around the country, but as any good Marxist knows, there is both base and superstructure, and as any good Gramscian knows, class wars aren’t only won at the barricades. While the base is chiefly the economy and relations of production, the superstructure includes anything from education to religion, art to law.
As post-Marxists would insist, and the Frankfurt school propounded, if Nazi writer Hanns Johst could say When I hear culture I reach for my gun’’, then culture does matter. Frankfurt school figures Max Horckheimer and Theodor Adorno note when speaking of the superstructure: ‘‘Capitalist production so confines them, body and soul, that they fall helpless victims to what is offered them.‘’ (‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’) To pacify the masses culturally is a good way of controlling them economically. Gramsci noted that, ‘‘Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. . . . In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.” (Prison Notebooks) The superstructure could seem more important than the economy, though politicians buying into the new neo-liberal consensus would think otherwise. As Bill Clinton’s advisor James Carvill proposed, in a now-famous phrase, ‘‘it’s the economy, stupid.’’
Is Blood Red Roses a work of superstructural hope against the base failure of Leftist politics? Perhaps. During an exchange between Bessie and her adult daughter, they discuss their respective positions, and we could view it as a discussion over base and superstructure. Her daughter is studying, and when her mum says that at present the left doesn’t know where to throw the first punch, her daughter says that some know how to fight, and Bessie says, “You 'ultra-lefts have to fight your way out of your own verbiage.’’ Bessie sees politics as a question of the shop floor and fighting for the immediate rights of the worker. Her daughter reckons it is more complex than that, yet is that complexity in danger of alienating the very working class the theory is supposed to support?
McGrath wasn’t indifferent to the theoretical arguments, sometimes even used them to defend praxis. In one interview, he quotes Adorno saying, ‘‘One does not understand a work of art when one translates it into concepts – if one simply does that, one misunderstands the work from the outset.’’ Olga Taxidou, who discusses McGrath’s use of the Adorno quote, also invokes Gramsci, seeing that McGrath ‘‘throughout his life was accused of being political, indeed polemical in many cases[...] in this context the specifically Scottish aspect of McGrath’s work is significant, as the work of Gramsci informed much of the folk revival in 1970s Scotland.’’ (The International Journal of Scottish Theatre and Screen) He would seem to see in Bessie’s discussion with her daughter an approach that acknowledges his own battle with the immediate and the abstract, the need to engage with the intellect, while insisting on the release of emotion.
In Blood Red Roses, the emphasis is on feeling, and while some might see a polemic at work, others will see a melodrama at play. Certainly, there are many human events here that wouldn’t be out of place in a good soap (Bess’s father’s stroke, her friend dying young of cancer, marriage, divorce, new lovers, etc.). But another way of looking at it is to imagine a soap opera that would include footage of the Falklands war and Orgreave, that would have at its heart a trade unionist, and would see a woman’s personal struggles as inseparable from broader social concerns. McGrath and MacLennan may have been graduates of an elite institution, but that didn’t mean they wished to ignore the struggles of people who busied themselves working at the base, rather than in the culture industry. McGrath would say we need both working in conjunction.
Blood Red Roses is an example of this conjunction at a time (the 1980s) when the economic power was clearly with the neo-liberals, but where culture was still capable of putting up a bit of a fight. When looking back on 1980s television that examined what working-class people were in danger of losing (exemplified by Boys from the Blackstuff, with its famous line ‘gizza job’), we can also see that it was more generally viewed as a social good, and a way of holding together a nation’s consciousness. As Thomas Elsaesser reckoned, ‘‘television in Britain during the Thatcher years had become the glue that still held it all together, while a large part of the population was un-or under-employed and politically disenfranchised by living in poverty ghettos, while the inner cities decayed, while the developers disfigured the countryside, while the public services broke down, while the education system ground to a halt, while health care was bankrupted and the utilities such as gas and electricity were sold off at bargain basement prices to financial speculators.” (British Television in the 1980s Through The Looking Glass).’’ Blood Red Roses might not seem like much, watching it in 2026, but within the broader context of what McGrath and numerous other playwrights wished to do on TV, and how little of that is left, it can seem a very important work indeed.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Blood Red Roses

Blood Red Roses can seem like standard TV fare, a three-part drama covering a working-class woman’s life over thirty years, and her involvement in union politics. But, though there might be little to comment upon formally in this work made with the 7:84 theatre group, responsible for the rather more radical The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil, it has certain merits. Both were written by John McGrath, who may have had a history in radical theatre, but was also a writer and director who had worked in solid, standard TV, including Z Cars, a TV show Ken Loach was also involved with. He was a Liverpudlian who studied at Oxford, and his wife, Elizabeth MacLennan (who stars as the adult Bessie here), studied there too, was from a comfortably off family, and whose brother, David MacLennan, became a life peer. She and McGrath formed the 7:84 group together, along with David.
Are we talking about privileged people making works about those less so? That would be to simplify the backgrounds of McGrath and MacLennan, and to misconstrue the nature of the post-war consensus that created far more opportunities for people from various backgrounds than had been hitherto the case. McGrath could work commercially or radically, but that didn’t mean directing television was the same as selling out, any more than making work about the proletariat was a sign of condescension. This was the 1960s and the 1970s, when television was seen as a public good, and by the time Blood Red Roses came out, it was still being protected on channels like BBC 2 and Channel 4, the latter of which produced the programme. Working in TV wasn’t what McGrath did as an aesthetic retreat, but as a certain type of public advance: to help create the consciousness of a nation. Numerous other playwrights thought the same: David Mercer, John Osborne, Dennis Potter, and David Hare were amongst the most prominent of their age, and all wrote for television.
This is a good way to approach Blood Red Roses, as it examines unionisation in Britain, and specifically Scotland, in the post-war years.  Bessie’s mother goes off with a fancy man just before her father returns from military service. She tries to take Bessie with her, but Bessie is having none of it and waits for her father’s return. The scene shows Bessie is a woman who fights for what she believes in, and the rest of the episode and the other two follow her battles chiefly on a political level. Bessie isn’t quite a typical woman in post-war Scotland, but the programme does explore how, if someone wanted to fight, they had causes worth fighting for. Bessie initially takes on the school system as she questions lazy assumptions made about gender roles. And she doesn’t do it politely. When one of the teachers (a man of the cloth) talks about their flirtatious ways to ensnare a man, and then their womanly duties once married, Bessie says ‘‘shite’’, and ends up giving the man a forceful shove. Earlier, in gym class, the teacher says ‘‘there’s nothing special about you, Bessie Gordon, though you seem to think you’re very special indeed’’, and says she doesn’t want weaklings in her class. Bessie picks up a barbell, lifts it above her head, and suggests that the teacher try to do the same. It ends in a scrap that Bessie clearly wins, but is then given the strap by another teacher over the affair.
From one perspective, Bessie could be seen as a troublemaker: she answers the teachers back, and gets into fights, but the show makes clear it is usually others who want to oppress, and Bessie resists this oppression. It is the same when she enters the workplace, taking a few minutes off when her friend says she is unwell. As Bessie stands outside, her superior turns up and gives her a dressing down. Bessie isn’t one for buttering up and promptly apologising. She instead lectures the woman about the inadequacy of the ventilation when working with dangerous chemicals. McGrath proposes that Bessie has always been someone who fights injustice and sticks up for what she believes is right, but he also indicates that this is only as good as the collectivity that can back it. Bessie finds this in unionisation and politicisation, and it isn’t until later, in the 1980s, as Margaret Thatcher works to destroy the unions, that Bessie moves from a figure of autonomy to one of impotence.
She becomes one of Thatcher’s three million unemployed. She fights a losing battle defending 550 women from East Kilbride at her workplace, and against the encroachment of global capitalism and further automation. But the place where she works proves to be of little value to this company, now owned by an American multinational. As the boss says, they are building a factory in Cumbria that will have machines capable of doing more work in one day than all the women working in East Kilbride can produce in a week. During the exchange,  Bessie says that though the company has the power, Bessie and her colleagues have the motivation, as she asserts herself by moving a lamp on the table out of the way and speaks of the company as part of imperial and economic exploitation. She doesn’t quite realise that times were in the process of changing, and that Ronald Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK were central to a new world economic order: neo-liberal deregulation. This is where a combination of automated developments, offshoring employment, immigration, and banking deregulation would all contribute to greater profit, but immiserate communities.
Though today many make much of the immigration issue as a way of explaining the deteriorating economic circumstances of the working people, graphs show that during the 1980s and 1990s, when deregulation was its most pronounced, and many were losing their jobs, unemployment went from 4 per cent to 12 per cent, from 1979 to 1981, and only dipped to 4 per cent again in 2019 many were suffering. It seemed economic rather than immigration policies were causing the pain, as immigration in the 1980s stood at 6.6 in 1981, and 16.8 in 2019. Tejvan Pettinger notes that ‘‘Supporters of this ‘Thatcherite Revolution' argue the 1980s enabled the UK to tackle long-standing problems such as inflation, poor industrial relations and a relative economic decline. However, critics argue the recession of 1981 was unnecessarily severe, and the supply side reforms increased inequality – without any noticeable improvement in the long-run trend rate of economic growth.’’ (Economics Help) Blood Red Roses makes clear it wasn’t the influx of immigrants but the collapse of unionisation. Communities weren’t torn apart by foreigners in their midst but what Thatcher called the ‘enemy within’: ‘‘We had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands,’’ Thatcher said. ‘‘We always have to be aware of the enemy within, which is much more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty.’’ (BBC)
Blood Red Roses shows footage from both the Falklands War, which was central to Thatcher’s re-election, despite high unemployment, and the miners’ strike. The enemy within remark was about striking miners, and Blood Red Roses offers on TV a news report of a clash that became known as the Battle of Orgreave, where miners and the police fought bloodily in the village of the battle’s title. The footage shows the hard power of union crushing, while Bessie is a victim of its softer manifestation. She becomes blacklisted as a troublemaker, and even when she reverts to her maiden name, she is soon found out and is removed from her employment. She claims to her ex-husband, who turns out to be the union representative, that this is unfair dismissal, but as Alex makes clear, she doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on, and others are unlikely to fight her cause. They can sack her for blowing her nose in the first three months, he says, and she acknowledges that the notion of them and us, and working-class solidarity, has gone, with neo-liberal forces picking the workers off one by one.
Blood Red Roses represents diegetic failure, but it is contained within its own relative success. In other words, while the show, made in 1986, might have been shown during the height of Thatcherism, and the weakening of the workers’ ability to hold out against global capitalism, it nevertheless itself was made. This might seem like a token gesture next to the defeats taking place in mines, steelworks and other industrial companies around the country, but as any good Marxist knows, there is both base and superstructure, and as any good Gramscian knows, class wars aren’t only won at the barricades. While the base is chiefly the economy and relations of production, the superstructure includes anything from education to religion, art to law.
As post-Marxists would insist, and the Frankfurt school propounded, if Nazi writer Hanns Johst could say When I hear culture I reach for my gun’’, then culture does matter. Frankfurt school figures Max Horckheimer and Theodor Adorno note when speaking of the superstructure: ‘‘Capitalist production so confines them, body and soul, that they fall helpless victims to what is offered them.‘’ (‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’) To pacify the masses culturally is a good way of controlling them economically. Gramsci noted that, ‘‘Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. . . . In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.” (Prison Notebooks) The superstructure could seem more important than the economy, though politicians buying into the new neo-liberal consensus would think otherwise. As Bill Clinton’s advisor James Carvill proposed, in a now-famous phrase, ‘‘it’s the economy, stupid.’’
Is Blood Red Roses a work of superstructural hope against the base failure of Leftist politics? Perhaps. During an exchange between Bessie and her adult daughter, they discuss their respective positions, and we could view it as a discussion over base and superstructure. Her daughter is studying, and when her mum says that at present the left doesn’t know where to throw the first punch, her daughter says that some know how to fight, and Bessie says, “You 'ultra-lefts have to fight your way out of your own verbiage.’’ Bessie sees politics as a question of the shop floor and fighting for the immediate rights of the worker. Her daughter reckons it is more complex than that, yet is that complexity in danger of alienating the very working class the theory is supposed to support?
McGrath wasn’t indifferent to the theoretical arguments, sometimes even used them to defend praxis. In one interview, he quotes Adorno saying, ‘‘One does not understand a work of art when one translates it into concepts – if one simply does that, one misunderstands the work from the outset.’’ Olga Taxidou, who discusses McGrath’s use of the Adorno quote, also invokes Gramsci, seeing that McGrath ‘‘throughout his life was accused of being political, indeed polemical in many cases[...] in this context the specifically Scottish aspect of McGrath’s work is significant, as the work of Gramsci informed much of the folk revival in 1970s Scotland.’’ (The International Journal of Scottish Theatre and Screen) He would seem to see in Bessie’s discussion with her daughter an approach that acknowledges his own battle with the immediate and the abstract, the need to engage with the intellect, while insisting on the release of emotion.
In Blood Red Roses, the emphasis is on feeling, and while some might see a polemic at work, others will see a melodrama at play. Certainly, there are many human events here that wouldn’t be out of place in a good soap (Bess’s father’s stroke, her friend dying young of cancer, marriage, divorce, new lovers, etc.). But another way of looking at it is to imagine a soap opera that would include footage of the Falklands war and Orgreave, that would have at its heart a trade unionist, and would see a woman’s personal struggles as inseparable from broader social concerns. McGrath and MacLennan may have been graduates of an elite institution, but that didn’t mean they wished to ignore the struggles of people who busied themselves working at the base, rather than in the culture industry. McGrath would say we need both working in conjunction.
Blood Red Roses is an example of this conjunction at a time (the 1980s) when the economic power was clearly with the neo-liberals, but where culture was still capable of putting up a bit of a fight. When looking back on 1980s television that examined what working-class people were in danger of losing (exemplified by Boys from the Blackstuff, with its famous line ‘gizza job’), we can also see that it was more generally viewed as a social good, and a way of holding together a nation’s consciousness. As Thomas Elsaesser reckoned, ‘‘television in Britain during the Thatcher years had become the glue that still held it all together, while a large part of the population was un-or under-employed and politically disenfranchised by living in poverty ghettos, while the inner cities decayed, while the developers disfigured the countryside, while the public services broke down, while the education system ground to a halt, while health care was bankrupted and the utilities such as gas and electricity were sold off at bargain basement prices to financial speculators.” (British Television in the 1980s Through The Looking Glass).’’ Blood Red Roses might not seem like much, watching it in 2026, but within the broader context of what McGrath and numerous other playwrights wished to do on TV, and how little of that is left, it can seem a very important work indeed.

© Tony McKibbin