Aberfan?

[Whatdoyouexpect]

We saw a clip of the Aberfan disaster on Gogglebox last night and wondered if there is anywhere we can view it? I can't find it. We were out of the country for 5 weeks and only just come back. Can anyone help?

That wasn't a programme about Aberfan. It was an episode of The Crown so if you look for that episode you'll find it.

Season 3 episode 3 of the crown on Netflix

www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-150d11df-c541-44a9-9332-560a19828c47

Ah, thank you so much.

Watched this episode last night. A very hard watch. I cried. A lot.

Agree it was a very hard watch. Dh and I sat in shocked silence all the way through. I thought it was really well filmed, utterly heartbreaking.

I’m on ep 2 of The Crown and am not looking forward to Aberfan episode. Olivia Colman found it very difficult to film, I hear.

It was such a hard thing to watch, as soon as I saw the episode title I was bracing myself. I really think it deserved to be a drama of its own, not a backdrop to the worlds most over privileged woman whinging about how she doesn’t cry, I mean do we really think the parents who lost all their children in such a horrendous and avoidable disaster care whether the Queen turns up and offers her faux sympathy?

Watched this episode last night. A very hard watch. I cried. A lot.

It was heartbreaking.

I remember when it happened - I was 13 - the shock that hit everyone was massive.

Aberfan definitely deserves a drama of its own. The National Coal Board was never even fined for it. Nearly half the school's pupils were killed - it is unimaginable. is very powerful.

Lots of information here
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04cb63l

If you can find it, The Green Hollow by Owen Sheers, filmed by the BBC for the 50th anniversary, is worth a watch.

You just can't imagine it, can you tribpot? Half the children - almost all of the young children - of a community just gone! In a horrible heartbeat.

Is this the one best?

Yes, that’s it. There were a number of documentaries made at the same time too.

My family are Welsh, so it's always been a big thing for us. I remember driving past all those graves on the hillside as a child.

The families were treated so badly by the Coal Board/Charities Commission. The NCB took £150,000 out of the disaster fund to help pay for the cleanup.

I watched it Saturday, heart breaking

It was appalling. I thought of Grenfell, disaster waiting to happen but no one listened.

I cried throughout that episode. It also reminded me of Dunblaine. Heartbreaking.

I thought of Grenfell too. The authorities were warned it was a disaster waiting to happen in both cases and both times they chose not to listen. They didn’t want the expense or the bother. And then it was too late. It’s just awful Grenfell was possible after Aberfan.

I still remember watching a programme about Aberfan where one of the children who survived because he'd been ill and not in school that day was interviewed as a grown up. He said how he'd had no one to play with - no siblings, no neighbours, no classmates - for the rest of his childhood. They'd all gone. Oh that made me sob. I though the Crown covered the despair well.

And it wasn't an accident, it was totally foreseeable and totally preventable.

If no one has read this, I highly recommend it because it’s just an incredible piece of journalism. I’ll never forget it as long as I live. It took me hours to get through, because I kept having to stop, take a breather, and digest what I’d read.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-150d11df-c541-44a9-9332-560a19828c47

My God - that's powerful stuff Haworthia. I couldn't read for crying. What a waste of all of those young lives.

And the sheer vileness of the government and the coal board - the equivalent of £20million raised for the disaster fund - and the government appropriated it and gave it to the board. Wouldn't even release money to provide headstones. Fought against giving any compensation until they were forced to- and then gave a trivial sum because "the people weren't used to having money and it would spoil them".

The bastards!

The village appreciated the queen going and that the royal family continues to support them, despite being severely screwed over by the government. They still visit apparently. That episode was written with permission from families and people in Aberfan.

Over twenty years ago I worked with someone caught up in it. Horrific situation. All the worse for being preventable.

I know at that time not all money raised had been given to survivors, I suspect it still hasn't been. There was little handed out, but what's not well known was the proposal to ask (I don't know if they did, certainly the person I met heard it was the case years later) that families how much their children meant to them to see how much they could be entitled to.

There was a thread on MN for the 50th anniversary and a surprising number of people hadn't heard of it at all. Being in Wales there was a lot in papers and programmes at the time. I didn't read the papers and only managed part of one programme created for BBC about it.

I've walked through the graveyard and read every single gravestone.

Usually wouldn't appreciate spoilers but I'm glad for the heads up because I researched the disaster in my own time, after covering related things at university and I had a bit of a breakdown (I'm a bit of an mh snowflake over things like this, I watched The Accident recently and it opens on the street we used to get our ice-cream from, the summer before we moved here last year, and then what happens happened in it and it reminded me of Aberfan, Grenfell...)

It's a very beautiful area to visit full stop, but it's worth visiting the cemetery and learning the history and being able to pay respects even if you didn't know anyone affected by it. The playground at the bottom was put on the site of the school which collapsed, so that the cemetery looked over it to see kids playing. It's a lovely tribute to a very sorry, sad thing.