Broke review: keep on keeping on is the message from this documentary about those just about managing
Billy kept an X-Box under his bed. Just in case he ever had a telly to plug it into. This didn’t look imminent, he and his father Steve being homeless and kipping in tents. First on the beach. Then in the woods. Then, as winter came, the beach again. They live in Hastings, as in the battle of, where they pick up zero-hours casual work.
Billy and Steve may not have a television, but they are on it as part of Broke (BBC Two), a profile of that swelling minority of Britons who struggle to keep their noses above water. The first part (of three) was scheduled, with mordant irony, to go out in the week Mrs May made way, having failed in her pledge to govern for the just-about-managing. The empathetic speech she made on becoming PM played out over shots of Ross, a lovely steelworker in Port Talbot who sits in a booth for hours and years on end for a wage that in real terms is going down.
It could equally have applied to quite posh Mark who once took professional snaps of Jay-Z and All Saints but is now three years into his late-life career gigging round-the-clock for Uber. “The only way we cope with the future,” he advised, “is by not thinking about it.” He still hopes to do something else. Maybe he should start an ostrich farm?
This is a proper documentary made according to old-school rules: watch, listen and stay out of the way. There was no talk of Brexit, no tut-tutting, none of the gawping or story-sculpting that marred Benefits Street. Two talked about “shovelling s--t” for a living, literally. All remained amazingly chipper. Adversity hasn’t wiped the smiles away. But perhaps they are self-selecting. When the programme’s request for volunteers went out on BBC radio stations, one anonymous caller had pondered suicide. “I’m just doomed,” he reported. “Being alive is just far too expensive.”
The episode tried ending on a note of hope as Ross entered the wrestling ring and lifted a massive opponent above his head. “I gotta be the hero,” he reasoned. His wife and daughters cheered. So would anyone. But the real heroism is to keep buggering on.
