Hands was dramatised from one of Sid Chaplin’s early short stories and broadcast in the BBC North East Region as a tribute to Chaplin, who died in January 1986. It features Tim Healy and Robson Green as father and son in a video drama which uses a mixture of studio recording, with stylised sets created by the use of colour separation overlay, location filming, photographs and songs (by Alex Glasgow), dramatising the life of a family in a mining community. Chaplin had worked as a miner and as such much of his writing was about the mining community he grew up in.