Less money than friends

As they leave the shop we see the long row of derelict houses that we saw in the previous film and, as she walks with the child past these houses, we hear her voice over the picture telling us how she feels about shopping with less money than that of most of her friends. She enters her home and begins to cook the potatoes. The child screams, she takes it to the toilet - it is leaking - she returns to her cooking. The husband returns from getting his unemployment benefit - flashback - where he sat for a soul-destroying hour in the dole queue.

They have their insubstantial meal and then sit down to watch television. The first thought that will come to some viewers’ minds is ‘Television! How can they afford it? Perhaps it is their own fault that they are in such poverty they’re lazy’. But then we hear their voices coming over the pictures explaining how the television set is the only thing that in a sense keeps them together. We hear her depression about the toilet, the damp, the food problems, We hear his depression about the lack of skilled jobs in his trade, the indignity of being on the dole, evenings spent in such a miserable, smelly, damp house.

Facts

At this point we want facts. How many families are like this, poor through no fault of their own? How many have emotional and physical problems such that they cannot work and how many people, even if they do work and have decent incomes, cannot get good housing because there just isn’t enough around. After a short piece of commentary, we cut to a Greater London Council planning discussion about how many people, and which people, need to be rehoused and how they are going to do it?

Now constructing a film in this way doesn’t give us just the facts about poverty and what people think ought to be done. Combined with facts, it leaves us with a feeling of what it’s like to be a family living in poverty. Out of this film comes really much more than a current affairs report. Above all we get an insight from both sides of the fence of privilege.

Research on poverty

Unfortunately, this second sort of film takes much longer to make. Like the current affairs film, there must be research on what are the essential problems of poverty. To illustrate these in a documentary treatment, you need the confidence of this family. We need actually to live with them, see what their daily life is like in the home, at work, in the supermarket, at the employment exchange. Out of this vast panorama of daily life we have to select just those bits, such as selected in the above clip, that show the kind of food they eat, the kind of home environment they have, and so on. Similarly, rather than just ask a politician what he hopes to do, we must get the confidence of the planners, Sit in on their meetings, decide which meetings to film, get permission to film them, and decide which bits of the meeting will fairly illustrate the difficulties they have in deciding how to deal with poverty, their sympathies with the problem, and their efficiency in finding solutions. To set up this filming requires much more time.

We also need more time to film, to get lights into the supermarket, lights into the planners’ committee room, lights into the house, special lighting for all the close-ups - each separate tin of food would need careful lighting - thinking much more carefully of the 101 shots that are possible in each situation. In fact the whole operation takes much more time and you get much more out of the film.

Why don’t we make more of these films? The reasons, as always in television are time and money. Such good and rapidly filmed reports come out of political programmes by the talking-head method that more and more people are saying why shouldn’t any film be tackled in this way? Why do you need so many weeks to set up a documentary film? If current affairs can do it with two weeks’ research, why can’t you do it with two or three weeks’ research? And so more and more the actual time given to set up a film is just not sufficient to use techniques other than the talking-head method. Looking at most television documentaries on the screen today, you are looking at a film report; ‘walking talking’ films with a slight extra gloss on some of the visual commentary linking sequences.