If you need a bit of respite from war, Covid and hyperinflation then may I just gently steer you away from the BBC’s Skint? The first quartet (of six) 15-minute monologues feel very much as though a commissioning editor has given four rather earnest writers each the task of dramatising key passages about life under this wicked Tory government from a Jeremy Corbyn speech – homelessness, the mental health crisis, the social care crisis, the horrors of gentrification, zero hours contracts and more. The general effect is to confirm what you already know or fear about the plight of the poor; but also that there is absolutely sod all that you, or indeed a television screenwriter, can do about it.
Of the four, the one about a waitress driven mad by class-based hatred is by far the most compelling, precisely because it takes us away from real-life squalor and deftly lands us in something like a scene from a Saw movie. Aptly titled “I’d Like to Speak to the Manager” and written by Lisa McGee, it features Saoirse-Monica Jackson as Tara, a hard-working, poorly paid waitress who finds herself unbearably patronised by some drunk, entitled, filthy rich diner who has inherited far more money than Tara and her entire family would earn in a lifetime. The snobby woman humiliates Tara by summoning her manager to complain about getting the order for the starters wrong (though Tara did no such thing). So Tara follows her home, ties her up and tells her, and us, exactly what’s wrong with the established social order.
