Channel 4's Skint - review

Tue, 14/05/2013 - 18:41 -- nick

TV deals terribly with poverty and the lives of the poor. It hasn’t always, but for every old thought-provoking Cathy Come Home there is a new thought-retarding Trouble on the Estate.

Channel 4’s latest attempt to bring a slice of ‘real’ life to the screen is Skint, a three-part series which premiered last night. It centred on the lives of Dean, Claire and their seven children and step-children, all residents of the Westcliff Estate in Scunthorpe.

Dean was unemployed, but had been in work for 23 years until his luck turned a year before. He wasn’t the only one in Westcliff; the local steelworks used to employ 27,000 people including Dean but now employed only one-sixth as many, leaving a huge hole in the prospects of most of the people who live there.

Deprivation was all around. Those playing poverty TV bingo – the clichés in this genre tend to come thick and fast – could tick off the appearance of a three-piece suite and mattress being sat on outside, helmetless kids riding motorbikes across gardens, a prostitute zipping up her boots, boarded-up housing and faceless and ineffectual police.

Those police were experiencing their own poverty; the car they turned up in was a Proton Impian, as budget a car brand as can be found in Britain.

The programme promised to tell ‘provocative and revealing stories’, and got this half right. As viewers have come to expect when the unemployed are shown on TV, provocative is the default setting, rather than something more understanding or thoughtful. Why try to examine the system that abandons people so thoroughly when you can show a 15 year old boy calling his Mum a ‘slag’? Where are the big ratings coming from?

Lawlessness was a constant in Skint, from the criminal damage of Connor, to the stolen food and toiletries Dean bought to keep his family fed and together. Channel 4’s pre-publicity said that ‘In an area of high unemployment, crime is always going to be an issue’, and the programme hammered this point home by showing a huge amount of it.

It is hardly helpful to those who already find it difficult to get work to be so closely associated with bad behaviour, especially when it is so unrepresentative. In fact, Skint seemed to base its evident belief that it was providing a valuable social service solely on the voiceover, a sub-Sean Bean effort that just stopped short of calling those on screen ‘scamps’ and ruffling their hair.

Local bodies, including Humberside Police, North Lincolnshire Council, Humberside Probation Trust and North Lincolnshire Homes, released a joint statement the day after broadcast saying the documentary ‘does not portray an accurate picture of what life is really like for the majority of residents living there,’ but then accuracy was surely not a priority for the film makers.

In our opinion, those who make programmes of this type should do much better given the huge amount of influence they wield. Don’t only show the smokers, the drinkers and the anti-social behavers if you want to claim some idea of truth.

Mainly however, the world of unemployment would be improved greatly if all TV documentaries which deal with this issue and the poverty it brings were forced to show the following warning beforehand:

‘This is a television programme. We shot hours and hours of footage, most of which showed perfectly functional behaviour. We then edited it, not to give you an honest portrait of the participants’ lives, but to boost ratings through showing the most dramatic and confrontational scenes. We then added music to manipulate your feelings towards what you see, and where this wasn’t enough we added a voiceover to tell you what to think.

The people we show have never been on TV before, and they often reacted unusually because the cameras were present. Sometimes they did what they thought we expected, and sometimes they seemed to act up because they have seen that this is how other poor people are represented on TV.

On no account should you take what you see as truthful or representative, or to make judgements on either the lives of those participating or poverty in general because of it. Most of the film makers went to Oxbridge and have no experience of this world. We don’t really know if what we saw is typical of poor people because of this, but we do know that many viewers’ idea of a good documentary is Police Camera Action or Big Brother so we tried to make it as much like those as possible.’

This kind of warning would help to combat the serious problem with Skint: it helps to reinforce some highly damaging opinions held about unemployed people, which have a huge effect in keeping them workless and poor. After the broadcast Twitter buzzed with hundreds of tweets, many of which recommended putting the participants down, castrating them, beating them and various other vengeful thoughts, while far fewer recognised how the film makers and wider society failed those portrayed as well as viewers.

Some of those viewers are likely also to be employers. The show was broadcast on the same day that the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development revealed that 11% of companies would not even consider giving a job to a long-term unemployed person.

With programmes like Skint toxifying worklessness so comprehensively, the only wonder is that this number is not even higher. Perhaps parts two and three will help?

Translate