Perspectives: Robson Green and the Pitmen Painters, ITV1

The story of the Pitmen Painters, a group of Northumbrian miners who decided to study art appreciation in their spare time and developed into a group of untrained but powerfully expressive artists, has been documented in a book by William Feaver and a play by Lee Hall. Robson Green's particular interest in the story stems from the fact that he's a miner's son, brought up in Dudley, a few miles south of the pitmen's hometown of Ashington.

Green may be a successful actor, but he's no art critic - "I would actually think, why is he showing us this?" he said, confronted with a slide of Michelangelo's The Last Judgement - but he used the story to reflect on his own past, and to look at the tornado of social change that has swirled through the old mining villages since the Pitmen embarked on their art adventure in 1934. Where there used to be networks of communities steeped in the mining tradition (coal mining began on Tyneside in the 13th century), now there aren't any miners at all in Northumberland.

Green's father died in 2009, and had been adamant that neither Robson nor his brother David should go down the pits. Robson made his first and probably last trip down a mine for this film, though he had to travel to Maltby in south Yorkshire to find one still operating. The Painters' work pungently documented the harsh and primitive conditions the miners of yore had become inured to, but Green was startled to discover that in contemporary coal-mining they use powerful industrial cutting machines instead of picks and shovels, and that the tunnels are large enough to stand up in. They seem to have done away with canaries and Davy lamps, too.

But even with high-speed lifts and a people-carrying conveyor belt it took a couple of hours to get from the surface to the coal face, and Green found the subterranean world hot and oppressive, as well as full of scary noises. All the more remarkable, then, that the Pitmen Painters had had the capacity and the will to come home from a punishing shift underground under far worse conditions, change into a jacket and tie (as somebody said, "leisurewear hadn't been invented"), and go down to their hut in Ashington and apply themselves to painting.

As Green put it, they were driven by "the hunger for self-improvement", a quality no longer detectable in what remains of their old communities today. More than that, they developed a collective spirit in which art was considered a gift to be shared, not a commodity to be traded for money. Considering that these were men who had left school at the age of 12 to go straight down the pit, and had never known a life outside Ashington, it suggested something deep and almost mystical about the nature of art and creativity (works by the Pitmen Painters, pictured above and below).

Under the benign eye of William Feaver, Green plucked up the courage to have a go at a bit of art himself. His first effort was a hand holding a milk bottle, though he confessed wryly that he'd modelled it using a bottle of Balsamic vinegar, "which I think sums up my life". Prompted by Feaver to try something with a father-and-son theme, his second attempt was a depiction of himself reaching up for freedom while standing on the back of his father toiling down the mines. It wasn't very good, and Green's hesitancy about showing it to anybody was wince-evoking, but his difficulty in expressing himself was another way of measuring the achievements of the old pitmen.

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