reporting poverty
Instead White Dee and the other characters of Benefits Street, came to be ‘stars’ in a documentary showing claimants committing crime, as unmotivated sofa surfers, unwilling to find work and not deserving of our sympathy. Academics from Teesside, Glasgow and Leeds universities produced Benefits Street and the Myth of Workless Communities and stated that tabloid headlines claiming 90 per cent of residents in Birmingham’s James Turner Street, where the series was filmed, received unemployment benefits were inaccurate with 65 per cent in some form of employment. While 1974’s The Family, said to be the documentary that
on women who ‘get pregnant for benefits’. In the tabloids only the Daily Mirror seemed to make continued efforts to avoid degrading terms and stereotype-fuelled generalisations. Slowly but surely social security for the unemployed and underpaid was becoming welfare dependency, those in need were becoming charlatans, and articles about benefit recipients, be they working or not, revealed a new threat to the UK – the poor.
Depictions of those on benefits as chancers, Fagin-like
characters ducking and diving to avoid a day’s work are now commonplace. The fact that House of Commons statistics in 2014 found 478,000 people claiming housing benefit in 2009/10 were in work – with an expected rise to 962,000 this year – seems an inconvenient truth. Television fared no better. Benefits Street, an ‘observational documentary series’ launched early last year with four million viewers, a larger audience than anything on Channel 4 the previous year. The passive viewing of Benefits Street is a far cry from 1966
when Cathy Come Home, Ken Loach’s film, sparked outrage at the state of housing. Its style differs to that of Goodbye Longfellow Road, a 1977 Yorkshire Television documentary, revealing not low-income tenants but landlords as swindlers.
sparked reality television, showing the life of a working class family of six in a cramped Reading flat, also made stars of its participants, Benefits Street went a bit further. Adam Thompson, a journalist at the Express and Star in Birmingham, went undercover for a week in 2014, seeking work such as cleaning cars on James Turner Street, to see if Benefits Street accurately portrayed its residents. He reported on tourists flocking to the street, concluding: “The irony of it all was that the people who were visiting James Turner Street were acting worse than the residents they had apparently come to mock.” He added: “Although some of the ‘stars’ have been allegedly cashing in on their new found fame – and I did see White Dee posing for a couple of pictures – many people can’t wait for this series to end, and for James Turner Street to become a distant memory in viewers’ minds.” Not everyone was viewing passively or saw it as
entertainment. Benefits Street inspired a debate on welfare in the Commons and, like Osborne, the Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith used it to political advantage. “Many people are shocked by what they see,” he said. “That
is why the public back our welfare reform package, which will get more people back to work and end these abuses. All these abuses date back to the last Government, who had massive spending and trapped people in benefit dependency.” Newspapers and documentaries now echoed, even
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