Five years ago, a 20-year-old motorcycle courier called Jerome Rogers killed himself shortly after bailiffs clamped his bike. Rogers was being pursued over two £65 parking fines that had escalated to a £1,019 debt. Without his bike, Rogers could not do his job, which included delivering blood to hospitals, nor pay what he owed. A year later, the Bafta-winning factual drama Killed By My Debt (still available on BBC iPlayer) poignantly dramatised Jerome’s life and death.
British television has never shied away from depicting poverty, debt and homelessness. From Ken Loach’s 1966 classic Cathy Come Home to recent documentaries such as Living in Poverty by Professor Green, TV has shown us for decades what poverty means. These are salutary and chastening reminders as we stand on the precipice of a cost-of-living crisis.
The light shone on these issues has not always been sympathetic. In the same year Rogers died, the then Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn called for an end to so-called “poverty porn” shows such as Benefits Street, saying: “The demonisation of communities makes it easier for politicians to make decisions that are damaging to those communities.”
Poverty, then, has a rich history on British TV. Some of it is rewarding and empathic, while some is predicated upon exploiting the most vulnerable for entertainment.
Cathy Come Home (1966)
This BBC Wednesday Play, written by Jeremy Sandford and directed by Ken Loach, depicts a young mother’s descent into debt and poverty when an unfortunate chain of events leads to her losing her home and, eventually, custody of her children. As her life falls apart, the increasingly disturbed Cathy is repeatedly told to “sort herself out”, as if all she needs is a stronger will. Cathy Come Home shocked viewers and led to a surge in donations to Shelter and the founding of another charity, Crisis, the following year. Its representation of unscrupulous landlords, family breakdown and the dearth of affordable social housing still resonate. Arguably, things have got worse in the past 56 years. On the 50th anniversary of Cathy Come Home’s broadcast, Clare Allan wrote in the Guardian that local authority funding for previously ring-fenced services aimed at helping vulnerable people had fallen by 45% since 2009. The result? Along with rent rises, benefits sanctions and the job insecurity of zero-hour contracts, these cuts have caused, Allan argued, “a massive increase in homelessness and the mental health problems this often leads to.”
Only Fools and Horses (1981-1991)
Some sitcoms dramatise the lifestyles of middle-class neurotics with first-world problems, Only Fools and Horses captured the struggle of those sucking on the fuzzy end of life’s lollipop. Derek “Del Boy” Trotter may have lived in a council flat at Nelson Mandela House, SE15, but like a modern-day Micawber (writer John Sullivan was heavily influenced by Dickens) he dreamed of escape. To make his plan a reality, he used his entrepreneurial skills – as in the 1992 Christmas special when he flogged Peckham spring water (straight from his tap) from the back of his Reliant three-wheeler to gullible hipsters. Del might have been a poster boy for Thatcherite business acumen but for the fact that his lifestyle and theme song resonated with the scammers, shirkers, and loafers more than politicians. For Del Boy, as the song had it, there’s only one question “driving me berserk: Why do only fools and horses work?”
Boys from the Blackstuff (1982)
“Gizza job,” said Yosser Hughes. “Go on, gizza job. I can do that.” Yosser’s “Gizza job” became as much a zeitgeist-defining catchphrase as Harry Enfield’s “loadsamoney”, and his tendency to headbutt anything – humans, trees, lamp-posts – symbolic of millions of Britons railing against inescapable misery. By the time Alan Bleasdale’s drama series was broadcast, unemployment had risen to more than 3 million thanks to the deflationary policies of Margaret Thatcher’s first administration. In the opening scene of the episode, Yosser’s Tale, the spiritually crushed hard man walks with his children into the lake in Liverpool’s Sefton Park – a sequence dramatising the mental health problems he suffered after losing his wife and job.
Bread (1986-1991)
Carla Lane’s sitcom depicted another family using their wits to avoid penury, working the system, via government handouts or the explosion of credit. For the Boswells, work-ethic homilies were simply the establishment striving to keep riff-raff in their place. One day, Joey asks Ma Boswell who was on the phone. “The electricity department – £145 they want. They must think we grow our own money. We’re all unemployed here.” Then Joey opens the post. “Ah, it’s my gold American Express card.”
Shameless (2004-2013)
Paul Abbott’s benefits baron Frank Gallagher was two fingers to the respectable working family demographic feted by politicians. Frank’s charmed life and those of his family were also seen by many as showing a hideous truth about Britain wherein straight society’s hard-earned was bankrolling crime and lassitude. Shameless, Yvonne Roberts argued in the Observer “had the perfect PR backdrop in the shape of New Labour’s ‘social exclusion agenda’ … a campaign to correct working-class behaviour”.
Benefits Street (2014-2015)
This controversial fly-on-the-wall series documented the lives of residents of James Turner Street in Winson Green, Birmingham. In the first episode, we saw shoplifter Danny returned to jail for breaching an asbo and another character called Fungi taking free magazines from a hotel lobby and selling them on the street. Labour MP Clare Short, who represented the area in parliament until 2010, argued that the show demeaned the people it depicted rather than informed viewers about poverty. She conceded that since the unemployment of the 1980s, a “new culture of drugs, crime and mental health problems” had arisen but said Benefits Street was not an accurate depiction of that culture. Short reckoned that “some of the people featured played up to the cameras … But, more darkly, it provided false justification for viewers to judge and sneer.”
Rich House, Poor House (2017-present)
Millionaires Matt and Monique Fiddes, who live in a six-bedroom mansion in the Wiltshire countryside, spend £16 a week on avocados alone. Andy and Kim Leamon, married with two children, live on just £171 a week after paying their bills and mortgage for their ex-council house in Southampton. As Tim Dowling, reviewing the second series for the Guardian, wrote, the stated aim was “to discover whether money really does buy happiness, a question to which the answer is usually ‘no’ when you have got lots of money, and ‘yes’ when you haven’t”.
ITV Tonight – Undercover: Rough Sleeper (2018)
Adam Holloway, a British army captain turned Tory MP, spent seven nights on the streets during for a documentary on rough sleeping. Others, including Jeremy Kyle and Ross Kemp, have made similar programmes, but Holloway used his experiences in his report to a parliamentary debate on street homelessness. “To be honest,” he told the Commons, “sleeping rough in central London is a lot more comfortable than going on exercise when I was in the army.” However, he acknowledged that “for those who are mentally ill, drug-addicted, old or personality disordered, it is a very different thing”. In the same year as his documentary was broadcast, research by charity Homeless Link revealed the number of people sleeping rough has risen by 169% since the Conservatives came to power in 2010, and that beds in homeless shelters have fallen by a fifth in the same period. In 2020, Holloway was appointed by Boris Johnson as a parliamentary aide with responsibility for tackling rough sleeping.
Coronation Street (1960-present)
Soaps have long depicted breadline Britons – take last year’s storyline in Coronation Street, about being trapped in a pernicious debt cycle. Yasmeen Nazir was subjected to coercive control by her husband Geoff, until he fell to his death from a roof while chasing her. It seemed Yasmeen could begin to remake her life, but Geoff had forced her to take out several huge loans for him. After his demise, bills piled up unpaid at her home and made Yasmeen fear that the family business, the Speed Daal restaurant, would be repossessed and that she would end up in jail. Her grandson Zeedan seemed to have saved the business with a £50,000 cash injection, but dirty dealings with his gangster father-in-law left him embroiled in a money-laundering scam.
Skint (2022)
This spring, the BBC broadcast a series of 15-minute monologues overseen by Lisa McGee, creator of Derry Girls. Unusually, each was written by someone with experience of poverty. What was most depressingly poignant was how many of its characters realised poverty is passed down like a generational curse. In one, Gary is the leaseholder of a stall in a market about to be redeveloped. He is plunged into memories of the slum clearance that destroyed his childhood. In another, written by McGee, waitress Tara is using her wages to support her widowed mother, alcoholic sister and niece. She recognises her life to be as circumscribed as her father’s. She recalls that his first question to the doctor, after being diagnosed with cancer, was: “How long will I be able to work?” “I don’t think that’s a question you should have to ask,” says Tara. And of course, she’s right. But, for some, even in the fifth richest country in the world, it is impossible to avoid asking.
