Synopsis:

Recording the lives and attitudes of four families, Grigsby's poetic work on the fragmentation of British society in the 1980s creates an impressionistic mosaic of the forces that affected the lives of these intelligent, articulate people. We meet a Devon farming family forced through bankruptcy to abandon their land after 40 years; a jobless family imprisoned on a Birkenhead housing estate; members of a South Wales mining community, bemoaning their reputation during the strike as 'the enemy within'; young Glaswegians travelling to London in search of work. Interviews with the generation born between the Wars are inter-cut with archive footage, the result being a perceptive and poetic analysis of the historical forces that shape people's everyday experiences.