The Big Flame was writer Jim Allen's second Wednesday Play and his first with director Kenneth Loach. After The Lump, about the exploitation of casual labour in the building trade, Allen used his Marxist credentials to depict striking Liverpool dockers enacting a Communist-style system of workers' control.

The play was filmed in Loach's accustomed drama-documentary format, honed on previous Wednesday Plays like Up the Junction and Cathy Come Home. Real dockers appear, and the actors speak not well-rehearsed lines but in the disjointed, often incoherent, manner of authentic speech. It is captured on murky 16mm film, giving the picture the same quality as contemporaneous newsreel footage. Only the occasional voiceovers diverge from the apparent objectivity of this fly-on-the-wall aesthetic. - BFI, screenonline