I didn't see the first episode of Benefits Street. I was doing my own take on Dry January: no Twitter, no TV. A sort of sabbatical for the perpetually bleeding-of-heart.
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I read about the second episode on Facebook. The programme's impact had been strong enough to interrupt the usual hum of domestic whingery and inspirational sunsets, bringing with it an unmistakeable hint of pitchfork, and an abrupt end to the sabbatical. Lucky me that I could take one at all.
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Some have criticised it as "poverty porn". Others have suggested that it has played an important role in raising the issue of an underclass often ignored or worse. For me, the series - which ended tonight - has raised more questions than answers.
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Perhaps my main question is: why the title? With 10 times as many people receiving age-related payments as do unemployment benefit, a more representative (if incendiary) "Benefits Street" would have been a corridor in a retirement home. There are suggestions that the title was changed at the last minute, and that the participants were misled about the editorial approach. Whatever the truth, the title raised my hackles less than this squandered opportunity of a programme eventually did.
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Far from the reported threats of arson and the deluge of Twitter hate, my overwhelming reaction was sadness. True to its genre, there was the predictable drinking, drugs and fighting - Â and the stock characters, like the picaresque Danny and Fungi, whose "Shoplifting for Dummies" segment landed them in (predictable) trouble.
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Less typically, we were shown warmth, friendship, kindness and mutual support, together with a quiet dignity in fairly hellish conditions. Behind all this, though, were undeniably thwarted and damaged lives. The series felt like a missed opportunity to explore and explain, rather than to gawk at - and naturally judge - a snapshot. I found myself repeatedly wanting the narrator to ask why, how, when, what - not just to portray the situation as simply a given.
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The series’ subtitle was "the reality of life on benefits", but it was more accurately the reality of poverty, deprivation, addiction and the aftermath of the care system and prison. Perhaps the producers didn’t intend it, but given the current race to the bottom on welfare cuts, there's an unavoidable complicity with a rhetoric which stigmatises and demonises as 'other' those who are already among the most vulnerable in society. It feeds into a prevailing narrative that the welfare state and its beneficiaries (over half of us, remember) are stitching us up, and permits, unquestioningly, claims from Iain Duncan Smith and fellow ministers that their changes are both essential and fundamentally constructive.
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There are other quibbles. I don't fully understand the labyrinthine benefits system in this country, and I bet most other people don’t either. Rather than straying dangerously close to the stereotypes of the feckless and fraudulent, Benefits Street could have given viewers context: far more is paid to workers on low incomes than to those who don’t work, supporting low-paying employers; housing benefit goes to landlords, not tenants. Figures for benefit fraud are much lower than the public believes them to be. Even Mark and Becky, sanctioned for over-claiming housing benefit, came across more as kids who'd naively taken half-assed advantage of a complex system than master criminals who’d set out to defraud it.
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There were nods to the fact that some residents were working, but we never met them, reinforcing the idea that the benefits budget is blown on the work-shy. Jobs didn't seem to be there for the picking, either: the only two opportunities which we saw were the unappealing (and unrewarding) options of sex work and a 100% commission-based sales position.
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So, was Channel 4 wrong to make the series? Giving people in difficult circumstances a platform and a voice surely falls within their remit, as does asking the hard questions about what could or should change. There was a moving scene in Episode 3 where Mark and Becky were visibly transformed when helped to gain the skills, confidence and impetus to become more assertive in their parenting, and the simple dignity and structure which the (ultimately doomed) promise of a job offered their family.
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No-one could argue that the status quo for many of those shown is ideal, but by framing the debate in the poisoned context of benefits, Channel 4 lost a rare chance to look more deeply at the scale, cause and effect of benefit dependency. They lost, too, an important chance to persuade to people to lower the pitchforks. It doesn't matter how sensitively you retell a fairy story, if it still leaves your audience afraid of the big bad wolf.
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Benefits Street: "A squandered opportunity to understand welfare dependency"
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KateMumsnet · 27/01/2014 22:41
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Preciousbane ·
28/01/2014 16:00
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