Hard Times (1977)

The 1977 Granada serial, not the 1994 version. Dickens wrote the grim factory town of Coketown as a furious satire of facts-and-figures industry, and this four-part adaptation keeps the anger. Timothy West's bombastic Josiah Bounderby and Patrick Allen's rigid Thomas Gradgrind are the system; Alan Dobie's Stephen Blackpool, a mill hand with nowhere to turn, is the man it grinds down. It moves at the pace of 1970s television and trims parts of the book, but Arthur Hopcraft's script stays close to Dickens, and it is the clearest look on this list at how the men who ran the mills justified them.