Slum Britain on channel 5

[MozzchopsThirty]

Did anyone else watch?

I work with lots of families living in poverty and this programme just highlighted how we haven't moved on much in 50 years.
It made me desperately sad

I wonder how my city council can sleep at night with a posh gold tree and fancy lights in the city centre yet there are people sleeping on the street and living in hostels

Yes I get annoyed when people with closeted lives say poverty doesn't exist in the uk.

Do people really think that?

It was quite good for a channel 5 programme!

It makes me grateful for things I take for granted like my own bedroom and central heating.
Terrifying to think we could be in that position, you never know.

I didn't think it was very good tbh. The idea was good - following up on the DC in the slum photos from the 1960s and seeing what had happened to them - great idea. But the bits on modern housing problems I found much less interesting. The family all crammed into one room in temporary accommodation - yes that highlighted the lack of council housing. The single woman with her cat - again I'm guessing that she was pretty typical of a the kind of person who could fall through the cracks. But the bloke in Blackpool who it quickly became clear was an alcoholic? Not a sympathetic figure at all. Moaning that he hadn't got enough money for food and eating in a soup kitchen when he was down the pub drinking pints of beer and sitting around smoking in his flat? He just made me angry. I saw a much better programme on homelessness on C4 a couple of weeks ago.

Not C4 - it was 'No Place to Call Home' on BBC2. It's on iPlayer.

I'll have a look at that

I think it's easy to say oh he's got no food but he's drinking down the pub, however I can understand how people use drink and drugs to numb themselves towards the situations they're in

I thought it was very well done, especially looking at the impact living in slum conditions made on those children. I disagree that only some were deserving of sympathy. The man with addiction problems was abused as a child and the consequences of that were evident in his life? In one of the slum families they were living like that because the father was a gambler. The only story I struggled with a little was the market trader and his family. Couldn't understand why living in an area of high employment 4 sensible seeming and employable adults were living in a B&B.

I watched it and my heart sank too. However, I did wonder if some of the unfortunates featured could not have done more to help themselves. It's too late for the alcoholics and drug addicts, but the guy who had formerly been a market trader looked fit and active enough to turn his hand to something - and he had a van. The attitude of all the participants seemed to be that somebody else should be providing them with a living and a decent living at that too. One of the men who had grown up in a slum had had the nous to do something about his situation and had managed to support himself in his adult life.