Aberfan: The Young Wives Club, ITV, 9pm, directed by Joe Williams.

http://www.itv.com/hub/the-aberfan-young-wives-club/2a4601a0001

The Aberfan Young Wives youngest member is sixty-one and its oldest members in their nineties. The joke was that the group voted to remove the ‘Young’ part from the group title, but there’s not a lot to laugh at here. The Young Wives Club meets every week and was formed almost 50 years ago in the Welsh mining village of Pantglas after around one-hundred tonnes of coal slurry from tip No 7, resting on a stream bed, in heavy fog rolled down the hill and over Pantglas junior school and the houses on Aberfan road. 144 people died, 116 of them children between three months and fourteen-years old. Jeff Edwards was the last child to be pulled out of the wreckage alive. The National Coal Board paid out £500 compensation for every child killed. One teacher was dug out his arms around two children trying to protect them, the other infants in his classroom by his side. Innocents killed by the Coal Board as surely as Thomas Hamilton’s bullets. Lest we forget.