Cathy Come Home

Firstly can I please put the record straight - this is NOT a movie, but a TV drama made by the BBC in 1966.

Carol White plays "Cathy", the mother, Ray Brooks the father. Through circumstances they find themselves destitute with nowhere to live.

Carol White's performance was absolutely without parallel, and I defy anyone who is a parent, to remain dry-eyed when the Social Welfare people find her seated on a bench with her children in a London railway station. The children are wrenched out of their mother's arms, the children screaming for their mother, and "Cathy" hysterical with emotion, trying to prevent their removal. How could we ever have lived with such a barbaric system? This drama served as a landmark in Social Services methods within the UK, and Carol White's superb portrayal will forever be regarded as instrumental in bringing about change.

I would like to be able to report that such things no longer happen in the UK, but I cannot. Perhaps in not such a heart-wrenching way, children are still removed from their families on the pretext of "child welfare" priorities. Priorities that are distorted by the setting of Government adoption targets - so just who is helping who here?

This is not family viewing, but is an important historical account of a time that none of us should be proud.

In 1966 it would be hard to envisage that Cathy Come Home was in fact a single play produced by the BBC. It was produced in a drama documentary style.

Upon its broadcast it was controversial as director Ken Loach was accused of mixing facts with fiction. The film led to the setting up of the charity Shelter and eventually led to the reform of housing protection laws in the UK.

Loach examines the plight of the homeless and how institutions that are meant to help end up being a hindrance that in reality break up families.

Cathy (Carol White) comes to London and meets Reg (Ray Brooks). They get married and have children. Reg has a nice job and they get on the housing ladder but when Reg has an accident at work and goes on benefits they go on a downward spiral of looking somewhere to live. Each time the housing is worse quality and its a vicious circle that they cannot break out of. In those days, people would not rent to those who had children, being homeless with young kids did not give you priority and it seems there was not enough housing at all.

As the film goes on we see familiar attitudes to the homeless situation, that it is their own fault, they are feckless, it is the fault of the immigrants who have come here from Jamaica and taken housing from the white folks.

In 1966 this would had been a shocking and provocative film. Carol White was a beautiful actress and we can see her eventually being ground down as her situation becomes hopeless. The final scenes of her losing her kids have still not lost impact 50 years on.

Issues of morality - whether we agree or not with director Ken Loach's view of his characters - are not really significant here: what makes CATHY COME HOME such an enduring classic half a century after its original release is its essential boldness.

Produced at a time when television drama actually could make a difference to public opinion, and the BBC regularly produced single plays dealing with contemporary issues, CATHY COME HOME tells a straightforward tale of the eponymous protagonist (Carol White) and husband Reg (Ray Brooks), who begin in relative affluence yet end up sliding down the housing ladder until they are left with absolutely nothing. They are forced to lead separate lives, with Cathy taking two of her children to a prison-like hostel while Reg has to find an apartment of his own. The action culminates in a memorable sequence taking place in an Essex railway-station where an indifferent gaggle of Social Service workers take Cathy's children away from her, leaving her in a tearful heap, bereft of anything and anyone.

Stylistically speaking Loach's production was highly influenced by the British documentary film movement of the previous decade with its cinéma-vérité style of fluid action, short sequences and voiceovers including Cathy herself as well as a variety of so-called do-gooders justifying their particular behaviors, even though none of them appeared to want to help the stricken couple. In an era still wedded to the idea of studio-bound drama, CATHY COME HOME came like a welcome breath of fresh air with its determination not to sentimentalize its characters and single-minded commitment to exposing social ills.

The harrowing final scenes, as Cathy's children are taken into care, caused an outrage. Within days of the broadcast, Loach and writer Jeremy Sandford had been summoned to a meeting of Birmingham Council's Housing Committee, as councilors were furious about the ways in which they had been portrayed. The homeless charity Shelter was established in a wave of anger at the way people had been treated.

Fifty years on, some of the attitudes might now seem dated - especially the casual racism and the basic distrust of nonwhite people - but the problem of homelessness still remains. How many more Cathys are there still roaming the streets of Britain's inner cities, relying on hand-outs and food banks for sustenance?

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning

Reg (Ray Brooks) and Cathy (Carol White) are young and in love, and eventually get married and have children. Reg has a good job, and all is going swimmingly, until he has an accident at work and his bosses refuse to pay him compensation. Unable to keep up with payments after the death of their landlady, they find themselves forced out of their home, and down into a never-ending spiral of increasingly unsuitable, uninhabitable temporary accommodation and bureaucracy that drives them apart and leaves Cathy in despair.

Last year, after announcing his retirement after making his last film (2014's Jimmy's Hall) Ken Loach surprised everyone and, as if to prove why celebrities should never use the word retirement, at the age of eighty made the incredibly well received I, Daniel Blake. But it also marked fifty years since his arguably most ground breaking, heavily impacting work premiered on TV, in the shape of this low scale production, that shone a light on the dire state of homelessness at the time, and actually brought about the formation of the charity Shelter, as well as significant changes in the law. Truly a testament to the power of film at its strongest...

It's ostensibly a drama, grounded in the cold, gritty reality of life, but depicting the bleak chain of events as it does, in its own way, it ends up playing out like an archetypal horror film, with the lead protagonists trapped in a chain of events forged by external forces that threaten to destroy them and everything they hold dear. The monster chasing them is the unrelenting, stony faced bureaucracy and prejudice of society and institutions, from which survival seems impossible. Loach further achieves this effect with the style he employs in the film, with the black and white frame that was still fairly typical at the time, and the various, opposing voice-overs, including the lead characters, that add to the eerie, isolating feel of it all.

A young pretender at the time it was made, Loach set his standard with this short, unsettling piece. His job is not to make entertaining films, or to make us happy, but to inform and provoke change with gritty, social realism. As he reminds us before the film finishes, everything that we've just seen really happened over the then last six months in Britain, so it's not like he doesn't do his homework. Regardless of your political persuasion, his sincerity to highlight what many more powerful people paper over is always to his credit. *****

A one-of-a-kind production that perhaps affected society more than any other. It's amusing to see that this TV production was part of THE WEDNESDAY PLAY because it couldn't feel like any less of a play if it tried. Instead it's heavily infused with documentary realism, so much so that you could be forgiven for thinking it was an actual documentary. Fresh and involving, it takes the 'kitchen sink' genre to the next level with its depictions of poverty and poor housing, and is expertly directed and acted throughout.