The national story is not just a royal one

This year we've already had the Tudors playing up in the BBC's adaptation of Wolf Hall and the rather less lauded MTV American import, The Royals, starring Elizabeth Hurley. Most British actors who can manage the accent will have a royal role somewhere on their CV, from Helen Mirren to Emily Blunt. Serial regal Judi Dench was Oscar-nominated for playing Queen Victoria in Mrs Brown in 1998 and won one a year later playing Elizabeth I in Shakespeare In Love.

And you can understand why. Britain's royals, from Mary Queen of Scots to the current incumbent, offer worldwide brand recognition. Everyone has heard of Robert the Bruce, Queen Elizabeths I and II, Victoria, Henry V, Richard III (no doubt someone is already planning a drama about the discovery of his body in a Leicester car park).

In short, if you want to tell the story of Britain, filmmakers, TV dramatists and even documentarians (hello Mr Starkey) can't resist the temptation to tell it through royalty.

Can I be the only one who thinks that's a problem? If the stories we tell ourselves about our own history are almost exclusively about those at the top of the social structure (with the occasional side order of military history) then we're not getting the full picture.

I was reminded of this by the recent news that Mike Leigh is planning to make a film about the 1819 Peterloo massacre, in which 15 people were killed and hundreds injured when a march for universal suffrage in Manchester was charged by mounted hussars wielding sabres.

If and when it appears, Leigh's film will join a very select band of dramas that offer a bottom-up view of our history, reflecting events not through the eyes of those passing the laws but those who live under them.

Ken Loach has contributed more than most to this genre, stretching back to his Play For Today dramas of the 1970s, including his epic TV mini series Days Of Hope, written by Jim Allen, which followed a working-class family from the First World War to the General Strike.

In 1975, Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo made Winstanley, a strange, beautiful black-and-white film set in the wake of the English civil war. It follows the efforts of a group of impoverished men and women, led by a lay preacher Gerard Winstanley, to form a settlement on the common land only to be met with hostility from local landowners and government troops. Winstanley's band were diggers who argued that the common land should be for the common man. It reflects a time when - as the 17th-century ballad had it - the world had been turned upside down, with the king dethroned and new ideas running wild; the time of the levellers, the diggers and the ranters, the latter believing that free love, drinking, smoking and swearing all could be ways to God.

What makes the film breathe is its gentle humanity, its simple amusement with men falling over in the mud as much as its provocative argument as summed up by one digger when he says: "Why might we not have our heaven here?" (Peter Flannery covered some of the same ground in his 2008 Channel 4 drama The Devil's Whore, but it was more interested in the grand national narrative and so inevitably Peter Capaldi turns up as Charles I.)

Some 12 years after Winstanley, Scotland's Bill Douglas finally released his film - which had been eight long and arduous years in the making - of another radical moment in British history. Comrades tells the story of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, six men sent into exile in Australia as punishment for their trade union activities. The result was a three-hour epic that disappeared almost immediately. It would be years, decades even, before it was restored by the BFI for a DVD release in 2009, by which time Douglas was dead.

"To tell you the truth I don't know what Bill's politics really were," says Comrades cast member, Alex Norton, now better known for his role in Taggart. But, he adds: "I don't see how you could be a Tory coming from that background." Douglas was raised in harsh poverty in the mining village of Newcraighall just outside Edinburgh, an experience he turned into the subject of three hugely acclaimed autobiographical films. "When I met him for the first time having seen the trilogy I kind of thought we would have a lot in common," says Norton. "But he was urbane, quite sophisticated. He was nothing like what I imagined the wee boy in that film would grow up to be. He had transformed himself."

In a way transformation is the theme of Comrades, Norton points out. "They're transformed by goodness, by the movements to bring the martyrs back home. So it's a political film in a sense. It's about the power of the people to make a difference. But I don't think it's an overtly left-wing film. It's a film about working people - and there are very few of them - and working people to whom a great injustice is done."

Neither film qualifies as agitprop, but both offer a reminder that Britain's history is stranger and deeper than is often allowed. It is a national story that took place in the fields and villages as much as in royal courts and parliament.

It shouldn't be a surprise perhaps that these films are the exception rather than the rule. As Norton admits, they were not box office gold. "I think generally people go to the pictures to be transported, taken out of themselves. Films that reflect real life and all its ups and downs are certainly not big money makers."

And yet, he remembers the sense of recognition the first time he saw Kes and its authentic presentation of working-class life. "If you go in today and say, 'I'm going to make a film about a working-class kid with a kestrel', they'd go 'Oh yeah, does he have superpowers?'"

But stretching the frame is not impossible. Last year Matthew Warchus managed a commercial and critical success with his film, Pride, about gay activists who decide to help Welsh miners during the 1980s miners' strike. It's a deliberately feel-good populist drama but that doesn't diminish it. And part of its appeal is the freshness of the drama. Here is a story that hasn't been told before.

How many other stories from working-class history could be reclaimed from the nation's back pages? Make a film about Princess Elizabeth on VE Day, sure, but what about a movie that tells the story of a nation emerging from a devastating war in a state of bankruptcy and deciding that it would build a welfare state in the ruins? Or closer to home what about the story of the Red Clydesiders and the battle of George Square in 1919?

That, Norton believes, would make an amazing drama. "Churchill the home secretary sent tanks into George Square because he thought the revolution was going to break out in Glasgow. It should happen because it's an incredible story about an incredible city. But what do we get instead? Glasgow gangsters and all that. That's because it plays. But if that's all we get it's a one-sided picture."

There are so many stories in our history. You don't need a queen in every one.

A Royal Night Out opens on May 15.