I’m a big fan of television. It’s not a secret and it’s something of which I’m neither ashamed nor proud. I like scripted television and I like reality television, but the only thing I want to watch when I’m balls deep into a sedimentary hangover is scripted reality television. The Hills, Made in Chelsea, Breaking Amish (that’s particularly good) – anything that pile-drives drama into the benign will make me feel better. This probably explains my love of period dramas and camp people.
I have no qualms with scripted reality television because it’s optional. You can watch it if you like it and not watch it if you don’t. But, as it’s very cheap to make and since people just love to watch glossier versions of themselves on the small screen, it’s not going to go away any time soon.
So, I refuse to get angry about the filming of Benefits Street, the second season being filmed within spitting distance of where I was born, grew up and may possible die someday. What I am going to get angry about is the commodification of human lives. Not just human lives, but people who are suffering.
Being on benefits is terrible, being on the dole is terrible, believe me. No one enjoys claiming the dole because with that you have to claim the responsibility that you cannot provide for yourself and have not been able to for the past two weeks. So when you see a person on this show who has been on JSA for a year, two years, ten years, remember that they have been making a pilgrimage to that stuffy, off-white, anaemic building with flickering lights and bored security guards; seeing the same faces, being asked the same questions and being reminded that they are still ‘available and actively seeking’ a way out from the Chinese finger-snap that is jobseekers’ allowance for exactly that time also. It’s also good to remember that you are just a mistake and a piece of paper away from being in their shoes.
So, as you may have guessed, I have too attended the same JobCentre that your new Monday night chums still do. Daryl House: a building with offshoots and ramps and a canopy to look at when you’re having a fag in the rain on the other side of the road. The second season of Benefits Street is going to be filmed in the Tilery estate of Stockton on Tees. A cluster of houses built before the Seocnd World War, which I recognise from sepia photos of my Gran and Grandad when they were younger than what I am now. It was never pretty, but it was fit-for-purpose, much like a lot of the town.
Two roads away from this so-called street is the secondary school that I would have attended if I was a kid nowadays. An academy that was created when my secondary school and an even worse secondary school were knocked down in deft unison to be merged into an all-singing, all-dancing academy. So brutally broken is the area in which this new season is set that this academy is sponsored by the NHS: this school is in such dire need of money that the NHS are subbing them. So naturally, this estate needs a documentary about how much they are indebted to you, the most generous taxpayer.
The first few rivulets of press that I’ve seen about this new season are defamatory at best. The twenty-second trailer doesn’t really portray its figureheads in the best light but that’s obviously part of a tried-and-tested formula in which jumping to conclusions is a completely okay, in fact encouraged. There's a lot of dropped consonants and bare arms. The media have already highlighted a few cast members who have served sentences for drug charges. Drugs! Heavens! Who knew that a council estate in the most deprived area in the UK could stoop to such levels of depravity?! What next, bareknuckle child fights? Animal prostitution?
It is nice to know that none of those rapscallions ‘feature prominently in the series’, as a Channel 4 spokesperson old The Sun. They won’t be in the show that much, but the press were able to make a full story about it. Make of that what you will.
If you want some actual, unflinching reality, Channel 4 actually planned to film this season in the Parkfield estate at the other end of the High Street, where they are currently building the town’s first mosque, but that would inevitably raise issues on immigration, which would be too inflammatory in this climate. So, in actuality, they’re moulding a reality for you to consume, because after all it’s your time and your home that you’ll be watching this in and you wouldn’t want your entertainment to be hard to take, just reminiscent enough to find it pitiful. But this is my home you’ll be watching.
I don’t care that this show was made in Stockton on Tees. Hats off to them; the Belle Vue chip shop shut before they got there, so God knows where they went for food in between takes. But let it be known that Tilery circa 2015 is a shithole, a dive, a place where smiles go to die, and so why in this day and age, when we are all struggling, are we treating other people that are frankly worse off than ourselves like the Victorians treated those in Bedlam? You do know they have all seasons of Arrested Devlopment on Netflix, right? Go laugh at them, at least they have been paid for reading their scripts.
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