There was a time when Danny Scott felt like the undisputed King of Selston.


Then again, there was a period in his life when he was pretty convinced he could fly - high over the Clay Pits and Pipe Yards and rough fields of the small, out-of-the-way mining village he grew up in.

But deep down he always knew that the real king of Selston was coal. Over the last seven hundred years, coal dust had settled on every inch of Selston. It was in the food he ate, the air he breathed and it had shaped the people. Tough men, like his dad, who worked the coalface for forty years. Tough women, like his mother, who never admitted she was blind, even though she regularly set light to her clothes and hair.

Though everyone knew Danny was a Clever Bugger, what would Selston think if he got ideas above his station? But just when he'd accepted that his future was underground, the country started to change. Coal was the engine of the Industrial Revolution, the electrical, rail and motoring revolutions; it fuelled the factories that had equipped British forces in two world wars; it had driven the 'white heat' revolution of the 1960s, the leap towards a computer-driven digital revolution in the 1970s, the power stations that provided the majority of the electricity in the early 80s and employment for five generations of his family. But now its time was up.

As the strikes and pit closures started to take away the only life he'd known, Danny realised he'd have to become someone new, somewhere else.


Funny, poignant and alive to the unheralded beauty, purpose and camaraderie of a village which finds itself on the wrong side of history, THE UNDISPUTED KING OF SELSTON shines a light onto a forgotten industry and the dark shadows that wormed their way into the families that got left behind.