The campaign for equal pay probably deserves a less twee telling than Nigel Calendar Girls Cole’s dramatisation of the headline-making 1968 strike by female workers at Ford’s Dagenham car plant.
Heading a cast of TV faces and Mike Leigh veterans, Sally Hawkins is typically fine as the ladies’ leader, an Essex-based Norma Rae whose soft speaking voice makes her rabble-rousing all the more stirring.
It’s jolly stuff, yet for all the bawdy banter, there’s a Boat That Rocked-like sense of a genuinely interesting moment being regurgitated as a cuddly sitcom.
