Brassed Off is a 1996 British comedy-drama film written and directed by Mark Herman and starring Pete Postlethwaite, Tara Fitzgerald and Ewan McGregor.

Parts of the film make reference to the huge increase in suicides that resulted from the end of the coal industry in Britain, and the struggle to retain hope in the circumstances.

[citation needed] The film is set ten years after the year-long strike in 1984–85 by the National Union of Mineworkers in Britain.

The loss of hope, pride and fighting spirit in previously proud mining communities was the basis for the idea of being "brassed off", an expression used in the North of England meaning "angry".

Beginning in early 1993, groups of miners' wives camped outside some pits' gates and outside the Department of Trade and Industry in London.

When Andy realises Gloria is working for management, he accuses her of naïvety for thinking the Coal Board is even considering the pit's future and argues that the decision to close would have been made years earlier.

As Danny collapses in the street and is hospitalised, Phil suffers a mental breakdown while entertaining a group of children as part of a harvest festival in a church.

The pub falls silent, as the word was an extremely serious insult in a mining community and implies treachery to the working class.

Intending it to be their last performance, the band, in full uniform and wearing their miners' helmets and lamps, plays Danny Boy (the famous Percy Grainger arrangement of Londonderry Air) late at night outside the hospital.

Whilst the band is playing in the National Semi-Finals, the outcome of the ballot is announced as 4-to-1 in favour of redundancy, as Andy had predicted.

After Gloria sets up a bank account to fund travel to the National Finals, the band is brought back together to compete.

The band forgives Gloria when she gives them her earnings from compiling the report (rejecting it because it's "dirty money") and travels to the final at the Royal Albert Hall in London (Birmingham Town Hall was used to film these scenes),[4] where they are amused by the inability of the woman on the dressing room's PA system to pronounce 'colliery'.

Danny arrives just in time to see the band win the competition with a stirring rendition of the William Tell Overture finale, during which Phil notices his wife and children in the audience.

The site's critics consensus reads: "Brassed Off combines inspiring drama with populist socioeconomics to create a film whose familiar outlines are filled in with genuine and surprisingly palpable emotion.

Paul Allen adapted Mark Herman's screenplay for the stage, the production premiering at the Crucible Theatre Sheffield on 17 March 1998, with music performed by the Grimethorpe Colliery Band.