When Labour won the election with a landslide majority last summer, comedian Rosie Jones found herself surprisingly torn. For six years, under successive Tory governments, she’d been working on her new sitcom Pushers. The Channel 4 series, co-written by Jones and Peter Fellows, follows an ensemble of disabled characters who start selling drugs when their benefits are slashed.
While the left-wing comic was happy that Labour had finally come into power, she was also worried that her sitcom had just lost all relevance. She imagined that, by the time it came out this month, “we’d nearly be a year into a Labour government, and living in a utopia where every disabled person is treated fairly. Unfortunately, here we are. And it hasn’t panned out that way. And I hate to say it, but I think we need a show like this more than ever.”
