The tragedy itself took place on Saturday April 15, 1989 when fans descended on Sheffield Wednesday's Hillsborough soccer stadium for the Football Association (FA) Cup semi-final between teams Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. As crowds built up in the stadium, there was a late surge of Liverpool supporters entering the back of a standing area, causing those at the front to be pushed against the wire fence separating them from the pitch; 96 fans were killed. Both the soccer community and the city of Liverpool were stunned by the event, and in the week that followed around a million people filed through the gates of Liverpool's football ground to leave flowers, football scarves, and messages.

     In the immediate aftermath, police in charge of crowd control at the match blamed the disaster on drunken Liverpool fans, and this was reported in sections of the tabloid press. In the following coroner's inquest a verdict of "accidental death" was recorded on the victims, and the public inquiry set up to investigate the event, though critical of crowd management, failed to indict the police officers in charge at the time.

     The idea to dramatize the event for television evolved after McGovern had touched on the tragedy in a storyline for Granada Television's psychological police fiction series Cracker (1993-96). In a three-part episode titled "To Be a Somebody," the actor Robert Carlyle played a man driven to murder in revenge for the Hillsborough disaster. Concerned that the fictional depiction of a survivor's reaction might cause distress, the TV company arranged a special screening for victims' families. The response was very positive and the Hillsborough Families Support Group (HFSG), which had been campaigning for justice after the event, invited McGovern to tackle the subject head on.

     With a commission from Granada (a company known for investigative journalism and groundbreaking drama) and the help of a team of researchers, Mc­ Govern set about writing the drama based on documented evidence and witness statements. A former schoolteacher from Liverpool, McGovern was no stranger to controversial subject matter, having tackled homosexuality in the Catholic church in Priest (1994), and discord in education in Hearts and Minds (1995). With Hillsborough he set out to do two things: to show that it had been police incompetence that had led to the disaster, and not drunken fans; and to show the grievous injustice the families of the deceased had suffered after the event. Contentiously, the program claimed to provide new evidence, notably that CCTV video tapes which would have demonstrated police failings had gone missing, and that police officers had changed statements and interfered with witnesses.

     Yet it was the human drama that made Hillsborough such compelling and upsetting viewing. The story focused on three families who lost teenage children in the disaster, including Trevor Hicks-who went on to become chairman of the HFSG-and his wife Jenni, who lost their two teenage daughters, Sarah, aged 19, and Vicki, aged 15.

     The program started with families seen joyfully receiving their tickets, and then the drama quickly moved to the match day itself. As Stuart Jeffries suggests, McGovern's consummate skill as a scriptwriter made even the advertisement break work for him. The first break was placed just as the crowds began to build up at the stadium. Immediately after the break, a father of one of the dead says to camera, "All they had to do was close off the tunnel like they normally did and we would have all had to go round the sides into the pens with plenty of space." This had the double impact of pointing the finger of blame, while at the same time avoiding a harrowing reconstruction of the crush itself. Hillsborough followed the families learning the news of the tragedy, the horror of identifying bodies, and the insensitivity of police questioning. The rest of the two hours was filled with the painful aftermath, and the costs of bereavement, including the separation of Trevor and Jenni Hicks, the families' fight for justice, and the frustration, pain, and anger at the coro­ner's inquest and public inquiry.

     Hillsborough featured a strong cast, including Ricky Tomlinson and Christopher Eccleston, a regular of McGovern's dramas. It was directed by Charles Mc­Dougall, who had not only previously made an award­ winning football-related short film, Arrivederci Millwall (1990), but had also been on the terraces with the Liverpool fans on the day of the tragedy. Members of the cast met with the families before shooting, and the families themselves watched the completed program prior to broadcast, in private screenings.

     The first transmission, on December 5, 1996, was watched by approximately 7 million people and made for difficult viewing. It had been sympathetically trailed in the press beforehand and was critically applauded afterwards. The docudrama reinvigorated public debate about the event, and the following summer, after the election of a new Labour government, a judicial inquiry was announced to look at the issues and evidence raised by the campaigners and the program. Hillsborough went on to win a clutch of awards from the Royal Television Society, the British Academy, and won the grand prize at the Banff Television Festival. It also won a prize of£ l 8,000 at the Munich Film Festival; Granada pledged the money to the appeal for the victim's families.

     In February 1998 the government declined a new public inquiry after a judge ruled that the supposed new evidence put forward by campaigners and the program did not add anything significant to the material available at the original inquiry.