Cathy is Still Left Out in the Cold

Ken Loach’s 1966 docudrama Cathy Come Home.

Half a century later, it is not a case that Britain’s housing crisis has moved steps forward or steps back, more like a step to the side. The picture is different, but we are as far away from the solution as we ever were. 

This was the conclusion I drew two years ago as I reviewed a theatrical adaptation of Ken Loach’s 1966 docudrama Cathy Come Home. You can read that here. The commission to review the play from Left Lion Magazine gave me the opportunity to deepen my understanding of the housing crisis in the UK and examine the ongoing conversation around homelessness that was, to an extent, sparked by Loach’s masterful docudrama. The experience set in motion a personal interest in attitudes toward poverty and why, if most of us agree that a roof over our head is a human right, do we tolerate such an unscrupulous housing system? 

There is a poignancy to watching Loach’s Cathy Come Home 52 years after its broadcast. The film is about a young mother caught in an unscrupulous housing system which leaves her homeless, dismantles her marriage and robs her of her children. Rising house prices and numbers of people being made homeless, stifling bureaucracy, and contempt for the poor and powerless is watched with depressing familiarity by the film’s audiences today.

The impact of the film at the time was seismic. The taboo subject matter - homelessness had not been depicted on television so graphically before, and its docudrama style inspired by French New Wave cinema, made Cathy Come Home a landmark drama. It really did change minds and attitudes towards homelessness. The public were outraged at Cathy’s injustice. Politicians were galvanised to change policy. A surge in donations were made to the charity Shelter and the charity Crisis was founded the following year. 

Today, a multitude of political, cultural and economic factors have resulted in wide spread indifference towards homelessness. Ignorance shown by some does by no means speak for everyone as many continue to complain tiredly for reform. 

Television that has played a role in the normalisation of poverty through ‘poverty porn’ and the criminalisation of the most vulnerable members of society. In the the social, cultural and political context of 2018 Britain, the docudrama that aims to galvanise people to change the housing system has a much harder task at hand. 

Comparing homelessness in the UK today with that of 1966 is a difficult task, in part because the ways in which the National System Board (NAB) records homelessness has changed over time. Following the Cathy Come Home broadcast, there was a public outcry for affordable housing and a safety net for those who slip through the welfare state. That year, one of the only government-sponsored surveys of homelessness in England was published by the NAB. They found that in December 1965, 965 people were sleeping rough. This excludes the 1,367 unaccommodated claimants of the National Assistance (the Job Seeker’s Allowance precursor) and the 28,789 inhabitants of commercial or charitable hostels. In 1967, the Guardian wrote: “Several million people now have had their consciences badly shaken about homelessness in Britain. Cathy Come Home has shown us how heedless we can be, and how heartless some of us are”. The same article posed a question that remains relevant today: “who gets [the houses], and why. Who is to decide between the claims of Cathy and her family - who have nowhere to go - and those of the long-suffering tenement dwellers who have been creeping up the housing list for years?” 

Thanks to tireless campaigning by charities Crisis and Shelter, a safety net was woven and ten years later, the 1977 Housing (Homeless Persons) Act - which made housing a statutory right for “unintentionally homeless” people - suggests the country was taking steps in the right direction. However, now, the net is too full and its holes too wide, as record numbers of people slip through into poverty. The number of homeless households has risen to more than 50,000 a year and more than 2,000 people a year will have no roof over their head at all. ‘The homelessness monitor: England 2018’ from the ‘Institute for Social Policy, Housing and Equalities Research’ at Heriot-Watt University, in association with Crisis, reveals just how desperate the situation has become for the homeless trying to find somewhere to live. A sharp decline in the building of social housing, spiralling private rent prices and welfare cuts mean councils across the country are struggling to house people. The monitor shows “the number of homeless families and individuals placed in temporary accommodation jumped to 78,000 last year, an 8% rise on the year and a massive 60% rise since 2012.” 

As Shelter states, the housing crisis is not about houses - its about people. The lack of affordable, secure homes is taking a toll on families across the UK and homelessness is rising, and in particular outside the capital. If Cathy Come Home is believed to have transformed discourse around homelessness for the better, where did it all go wrong?

Cathy Come Home got Britain talking about homelessness and poverty and this is a conversation the country continues to have with itself. Professor Hartley Dean draws attention to poverty as a discursive phenomenon, as a part of a system of often slippery ideas and meanings that derive from the everyday use of language. A pejorative use of the notion is perpetuated by British media, namely tabloids and television docudramas. Series “Benefits Street” (2014), according to Channel 4’s Head of Factual Programmes Ralph Lee, aims to portray “whats life like in Britain in a year where benefits are being cut by the government, over a long period of time, for a community that has, in spite of the hardship that it goes through, a very strong sense of community.” On the contrary, British columnist and political activist Owen Jones has called the programme “medieval stocks updated for a modern format”. It is not hard to draw the conclusion that this recent spate in poverty porn serves to outrage viewers and humiliate those the programmes’ choose to (mis)represent. On BBC Newsnight, Jones blamed sensationalist docudramas for encouraging a “relentless, almost obsessive, hunting down of the most extreme, dysfunctional, unrepresentative people on benefits”. In which, tropes such as ‘mother with too many children’ and the ‘foreign scrounger’ are recycled over and over.  

Clearly, an unbalanced, am-dram reconstruction, watched by millions, about what life is like on the bread-line is going to have very real consequences for the public discourse around poverty. In 2013, the TUC poll addressed the misconceptions about welfare in Britain. It reveals that, on average, people believe 41% of the entire welfare budget is spent on benefits for unemployed people. The actual figure is 3%. Similarly, the population believes  27% is claimed fraudulently whilst this is only 0.7%. Documentaries are meant to educate and entertain but the proportion of programmes aired that are disproportionate with the factual figures provoke a misattribution of blame.

During a time of austerity, it would seem strange that Britons would support further welfare cuts by the Conservative government. However, it comes as little surprise when a ‘skivers vs strivers’ rhetoric is perpetuated by reality TV shows. Approximately 75% of voters think ‘too much money is being wasted on paying benefits’ and the rise of reality television can be seen as a major cause of this inaccurate public debate. The aftershocks of the broadcast back of Cathy Come Home can be detected in most contemporary docudramas but the conversation around poverty has changed. That which is outside the text, like discourse, informs and throws light on the text’s meaning. There is more of a demand than ever for a contemporary Cathy to unite as opposed to divide the nation. But would she be watched with the same empathy and compassion as she was in 1966, or would she be viewed with distain? 

One only has to take a critical historicist approach to understand just how much the context of a cultural artefact informs its meaning. Rita Felski suggests “the critic probes for meanings inaccessible to authors as well as ordinary readers, and exposes the text’s complicity in social conditions that it seeks to deny or disavow. Context, as the ampler, more expansive reference point, will invariably trump the claims of the individual text, knowing it far better than it can ever know itself.” A reading of Cathy Come Home that acknowledges it as produced in and by the very economic structure it aimed to criticise might provide some navigation when 52 years on, the housing crisis has got much worse. However, watching the film wearing only a Marxist lens would prevent a reading of the docudrama as a politically galvanising and subversive cultural object. In a post show talk following the Cardboard Citizens’ 50th anniversary community ensemble staging Ken Loach’s seminal film, Campbell Robb (CEO Shelter) spoke about the brief period following the film’s broadcast where more people lived in social housing than in the private rented sector. He highlighted the failure of successive governments to invest in genuinely affordable, decent social housing resulting those with very challenging life events have now ended up at the mercy of private landlords, of increasing rents, without the support they need. 

Cathy Come Home transformed, and continues to inform, the discussion about homelessness and poverty. Its graphic visuals, political incentives and creative license would not be possible in the context of today’s BBC. In a BAFTA Heritage talk alongside Tony Garnett in 2016, Ken Loach explains how today the hierarchy above the director and the writer is so forbidding people would know [about the creative decisions] at every stage. “Writers and directors and producers don’t get the chance to be original in the way we were hugely lucky to be able to”. Garnett, the film’s producer, describes the television industry in 1966 has having “just enough room” and Cathy Come Home as “just possible”. The politically correct nature of the BBC meant it was repressive, but did not stifle creativity like many argue it does today. “Why Docudrama?: Fact-fiction on Film and TV” by Alan Rosenthal explores how the form wields more influence than the average documentary and that the narrative based on reality is the most popular television genre in the UK and US because they claim to show “reality itself” with a maintenance of a “true perspective”. In the third essay, “British TV Dramadocumentary: Origins and Developments” written by John Corner, it is noted that the BBC had anxiety about repeating dramatised documentaries. A very rare repeat of Cathy Come Home, one week after its first broadcast on the 16 November 1966 can be seen as  testament to the film’s seismic impact on the nation.

Jacob Leigh has examined the intersection between art and politics that distinguishes Ken Loach’s film’s. He examines the director’s realistic style, inspired by admiration for the French New Wave cinema, and his focus on social realities in individual and psychological terms, as opposed to economic and political ones. The very framing of Cathy Come Home was controversial. Shot with a hand-held 16mm cameras to give a look of gritty realism; the people in front of the lens doing the work as opposed to the camera, which was a “sympathetic observer”. The technique undoubtably influenced a public response torn as to whether this work of fictional journalism was fact or fiction.

Perhaps what distinguishes the discourse around homelessness in 2018 from 1966 is an ideologically different way of looking at the concept of ‘home’. In the same post show discussion, Campbell Robb argues the nation has lost ownership of the notion. ‘Home’, he says, has become an economic investment - a privilege for a few, when it should be a right for everyone. As Shelter states, “A home isn’t just a roof over your head. It’s a place that provides security, privacy, and links to a community and support network. It needs to be affordable, with support if necessary.” Cathy Come Home still touches us today, but the job of the docudrama and of art as a whole, to inspire compassion and ignite protest, is trickier than ever and should not be underestimated. The blame has been shifted away from true causes of Cathy’s predicament: unscrupulous landlords, negligent employers, dearth of affordable housing. Today, watching Cathy Come Home leaves a bitter taste in the mouth because to do so, she must exert the will she apparently lacks.

References 

Coffey, Molly. “Theatre Review: Cathy.” LeftLion, 22 Oct. 2016, www.leftlion.co.uk/read/2016/october/theatre-review-cathy-8666/.

“What Is the Housing Crisis.” What Causes Homelessness? - Shelter England, england.shelter.org.uk/campaigns_/why_we_campaign/the_housing_crisis/what_is_the_housing_crisis.

Shelter. “Homelessness Factsheet.” shelter.org.uk, Oct. 2007, england.shelter.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/66379/Homelessness_factsheet.pdf.

Bowpitt, Graham. “Half a Century of Homelessness in the UK – Here's What Has Changed.” The Conversation, The Conversation, 31 May 2018, theconversation.com/half-a-century-of-homelessness-in-the-uk-heres-what-has-changed-70243.

“Homelessness Monitor.” Crisis, Apr. 2018, www.crisis.org.uk/ending-homelessness/homelessness-knowledge-hub/homelessness-monitor/.

“Housing for the Homeless.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 13 Jan. 1967, www.theguardian.com/century/1960-1969/Story/0,,106467,00.html.

Dean, Hartley. “Poverty Discourse and the Disempowerment of the Poor.” Critical Social Policy, vol. 12, no. 35, 1992, pp. 79–88., doi:10.1177/026101839201203505.

BBCNewsnight. “Is Channel 4's Benefits Street 'Poverty Porn'? - Newsnight.” YouTube, YouTube, 9 Jan. 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=mszhESGvE_c.

Chief, Drupal. “Support for Benefit Cuts Dependent on Ignorance, TUC-Commissioned Poll Finds.” TUC, 10 Mar. 2014, www.tuc.org.uk/news/support-benefit-cuts-dependent-ignorance-tuc-commissioned-poll-finds.

Parker, George. “Britons Back Further Welfare Cuts, Says Poll.” Financial Times, Financial Times, 20 Apr. 2015, www.ft.com/content/a548291c-e763-11e4-a01c-00144feab7de.

Felski, Rita. “‘Context Stinks!".” New Literary History, vol. 42, no. 4, 2011, pp. 573–591., doi:10.1353/nlh.2011.0045.

cardboardcitztv. “Cathy Come Home - Post Show Discussion with Ken Loach.” YouTube, 3 Aug. 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=czXSNtLwg9s.

“Why Docudrama?: Fact-Fiction on Film and TV”, by Alan Rosenthal, Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 2002.

“Leigh, Jacob. The Cinema of Ken Loach: Art in the Service of the People.” Wallflower, 2002.