Given my Dagenham background - I went to school there and started my journalistic career there and still play cricket there once a year - it was natural that I should go to see the new movie Made in Dagenham.
It's about the 1968 strike by female sewing machinists at Ford's that led directly to the passing of the Equal Pay Act two years later.
I left the Barking & Dagenham Advertiser in 1967, so I wasn't a witness to the dispute, but I covered almost every strike - all by men, of course - in the previous three-and-a-half years.
So I soon spotted the film's flaws. The women it portrayed were too young and too pretty.
They may have used bad language, but not as casually as suggested, and the f-word was certainly not in common use among women of that generation at that time. (A letter-writer to yesterday's Daily Mail, former Dagenham resident Jacquee Storozynski-Toll, was spot on about that).
Some workers did cycle every day to the Ford plant, but few women did and certainly not en masse. The flats looked down at heel but, in 1968, that wasn't so. Anyway, most people lived at ground level on the vast Becontree Estate.
I also noted that the voice-over at the beginning said 55,000 people worked at the Dagenham factory and later a character spoke of the total being 40,000.
Did any of this ruin the film for me? Not in the least. It was an unashamedly feel-good movie, and it got the essential messages across.
It rightly pointed to the disgraceful compromise deals almost always sought by male union shop stewards (and their perks, and their cosiness with management).
It was right about the lack of male solidarity as the strike began to bite, and consequent household tensions (Peter Hitchens, sadly, derides this aspect). It correctly interpreted the way in which the employment secretary Barbara Castle adopted the women's cause.
Most importantly, the film captured a sense of working class solidarity (much like 1990s' movies such as The Full Monty and Brassed Off) that is too easily forgotten. Especially in the much-changed place called Dagenham.
