During this year’s installment of the annual Open City Documentary Festival in London, the leftist painter and writer Laura Grace Ford presented two television programs from 1990, under the common title “An Act of Unforgetting,” a phrase borrowed from Mark Fisher. These consisted of an episode of the four-part Summer on the Estate, set on a drastically underfunded public housing estate in Hackney, East London, and Battle of Trafalgar, a detailed account of the demonstration that year against Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax.

These were depictions of politically charged moments that would totally disappear from public discourse for the rest of the 1990s and 2000s — one, the evisceration of the welfare state that Thatcher inflicted on working-class communities, and two, the mass movement on the streets that brought her down. But today it seems extraordinary that they made it onto mainstream commercial television at all.

Battle of Trafalgar resembled the sort of engaged “citizen journalism” that would be used in organizations like Indymedia a decade later — an account of a “riot” from the alleged rioters’ perspective, forensic in its criticism of police tactics. For viewers accustomed to recent, crasser programs on similar subjects like Benefits Street, what was noticeable in Summer on the Estate was the absence of commentary, condemnation, or even musical score — no softening of the harsh but humane account of people forced into extreme circumstances. Both were shown on Channel 4, a commercial channel set up at the start of the 1980s that now specializes in game shows and reality TV.