Made in Dagenham

British film-makers have clearly decided that modern British political history can best be seen as a joke, in which all concerned are to be smiled at patronisingly. Maybe the influence of satirical sitcoms during the film-makers' youth rendered them incapable of taking anyone seriously, even Margaret Thatcher and Ted Heath. The latest victims of this production syndrome (damning with faint comic praise) are working-class women - the striking sewing machinists who brought Ford to a halt in 1968 and form the cliched heroines of Made in Dagenham.

The movie's French distributors gave it a titillating yet relevant title, We Want Sex Equality. In Germany and Italy, that was re-translated as We Want Sex, which gives one a hint about those countries' marketing men.

Director Nigel Cole (Saving Grace, Calendar Girls) was handed a banal screenplay by William Ivory, whose award-winning TV work includes Common as Muck and The Sins. The real-life tale of working-class women who struck for equal pay and rights had great potential, though interview comments by some of the women concerned indicate why Ivory needed to fabricate a sassy, politically-aware strike leader, Rita O'Grady. She's a natural role for Sally Hawkins, one of Mike Leigh's few cheerful lead actresses.

A galaxy of well-known names and faces flickers fitfully on the sets (factory floor and exterior). Geraldine James is the weary shop steward with an unemployable war-damaged husband, Bob Hoskins the rebellious local union man whose single mum raised her family on unequal pay, and there's a mini-skirted doll who thinks the strike is an entree to modelling. Add Ford's ludicrously oppressive American negotiator, the union leadership's chauvinist Ford collaborators, and the elegantly bolshie-minded uni-educated wife (Rosamund Pike) of Ford's UK boss (Rupert Graves) and the PM of the time, Harold Wilson (John Sessions) sucking a pipe judiciously.

Then Labour minister Barbara Castle (Miranda Richardson in a role that should be hers to play in a real drama) swallows a whisky and stomps to the rescue of the women, inspired by Rita and three acolytes, we are expected to believed, to dare Ford to do its worst. Within a couple of years (a short political period even in Wilsonian terms), the UK (and Ford) have led the world to statutory rights of equal pay.

This is modern political history written for comic-book readers, who deserve - and would probably appreciate - a more intelligent introduction to key events in 20th-Century Britain.