Written as part of a writing workshop by fifteen of the dockers who lived through the Liverpool Dockers' Strike with the help of Jimmy McGovern and Irvine Welsh. The process was documented in the Dockers: Writing the Wrongs (1999) which was broadcast ahead of this play.
The film was repeated, originally in early 2000, in a three-part serialised version for schools and colleges. It was broadcast as part of the long-running educational series The English Programme on Channel 4 Schools.