Benefits Street (Channel 4)
“There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.”
It’s one of Margaret Thatcher’s most iconic quotations, even though, in the full context of the 1987 Woman’s Own interview from which it comes, she was actually saying something more nuanced – perhaps even the opposite of the assumed meaning. The line has stuck, though, because it speaks directly to the lived experience of Thatcherism for millions of Britons. Under the Iron Lady, community bonds, mutual obligation and the notion of shared responsibility for those at a structural disadvantage in society took a back seat to efforts to diminish the duties of the state and encourage entrepreneurial, rapacious individualism.
The vehemence with which our current unelected government is pursuing a metastasised version of this doctrine is, quite rightly, the subject of regular discussion. Less widely noted, I believe, is what might be called ‘soft Thatcherism’: not doctrinaire policy positions but the creeping presumption underlying much of our pop-culture output that the individual is indeed of paramount importance, while the social and political context in which individuals act goes largely uninterrogated. There are certain forms – pop songs, feature films – that have always been rooted in individual experience, at least in our culture. But this tendency has also come to characterise a form that used to know better: television documentary.
Two Channel 4 documentaries – or ‘factual’ programmes, as they’re now generally called – that went out in the UK on Monday night offer a perfect collective case study. Benefits Street offered viewers a look at the lives of the “the residents of one of Britain’s most benefits-dependent streets”, Birmingham’s James Turner Street. It was followed by Secrets of the Living Dolls, which examined the little-known phenomenon of female masking, in which “men transform themselves into dolls by squeezing into elaborate rubber second skins”.
Both programmes were entertaining and provocative. But both took for granted that the best way to present – and, by implication, to understand – their respective subjects was exclusively through observing and then presenting, in inevitably partial form, the personal experiences of a handful of individuals, framed by jaunty music and a voiceover whose informal tone sometimes evokes a fellow viewer rather than a source of authority. Few efforts were made to ‘zoom out’ from personal contingencies to generally applicable observations, to make arguments about what these specific experiences tell us about how we all live today – which, I would suggest, is what TV documentary at its best is uniquely well placed to do.
Men donning quasi-realistic full-head masks of female faces and, in some cases, matching body suits is, as I wrote earlier in the week, an inherently freaky topic. But Secrets of the Living Dolls did an admirable job of presenting its subjects in a sympathetic and rounded light without sneering or sensationalism – a task made that bit harder by the fact that a masked interviewee, like one wearing a niqab, presents pretty much zero facial expressiveness. Even so, the maskers featured came across as decent, thoughtful human beings with a devoted interest to a particular kink that harms no one.
Of course, there were moments of bizarre humour (a tea party where tea had to be drunk through straws, one subject’s unforgivable choice to wear Crocs); and if there seemed to be some magical thinking going on regarding the beauty of the masks in question, well, such things are always a matter of taste. You’d have to have a hard heart indeed not to be impressed by the courage of maskers going out in public fully dressed for the first time, to bridle at the aggression they faced, or to be moved by the support of their loved ones. For me, the heart of the show was in an Essex woman’s response her friend Joel’s “coming out of the dollhouse”: “He’s always been an honest friend. I’ve had a lot of friends who don’t wear masks and have lied to me.”
And yet, in essence, scattered instances of individual experience were allowed to stand for a collective phenomenon that is surely more than the sum of such superficial parts. There were passing references to the orifices of the body suits – an installed rectum here, things “shoved up” vaginas there – but no engagement with the sexual aspect of masking. Nor did we learn whether any substantial academic or psychological research had been carried out into the phenomenon. We were told it has led to many relationships breaking up and I’d have been curious to hear a kink-positive relationship counsellor’s take – or, for that matter, that of someone involved in developing the scenes’s styles and fashions.
My basic point here is that documentary-making that gravitates towards human interest – the charismatic, the confrontational, the funny (intentional or otherwise) – is ill-equipped to account for the more seismic and structural forces underpinning individual lives, the things that can make a mockery of individual agency in any given localised situations. An archetypal instance of such forces in action would be poverty, which has the added downside for programme-makers of being largely characterised by grinding slog punctuated by crushing boredom. These are not things telly likes. Which brings us to Benefits Street.
This was not a documentary about a numerically tiny subculture with curiosity value, but a show predicated on a situation affecting millions of British people: the swingeing reductions of a whole raft of benefits payments, particularly those related to unemployment and incapacity. It took the form not of argument or contextualisation but of observational footage of a handful of specific individuals, mostly with obviously telegenic stories. “It’s not just full of people that go round shoplifting or stealing or selling drugs,” one resident insisted of her neighbourhood. “There’s honest, good working people in this area.” But the most prominent subjects, Fungi and Danny, were all about shoplifting, stealing and buying drugs (not least alcohol); others discussed their convictions for benefits fraud. Those engaged in more constructive activities got relatively little screen time.
There was no contextualisation of the policy shifts creating the challenging circumstances on which the show fed and barely any distinction was made between different kinds of benefits. Certain sensational elements were allowed to float past unexamined: it wasn’t explained how growing weed in the spare room might be a way around bedroom tax; nor was there any follow-up to Fungi’s mentioning that he had been “messed about with when I was a kid” and consequently prescribed diazepam since he was 16 – not, perhaps, the ideal recipe for a constructive member of society. Throughout the programme, the focus was on delivering entertaining snippets of individuals’ actions – and, given how entertaining we all know crime programming to be, more time was devoted to that than anything else. Did this fairly represent the lived experiences of the majority of the nation’s actual benefits claimants? Or tell us anything about the social and political implications of the radical overhaul of the benefits system? God, lighten up – it’s just telly!
Here, then, is the perfect instance of Thatcherite documentary-making. In Benefits Street, there’s no such thing as society, only individual men and women, and most of them are up to no good. Some residents of James Turner Street aired their dismay in the Birmingham Mail at the programme’s partiality but if it came as a surprise, they can’t have been watching much telly lately. The gulf in material circumstances notwithstanding, Benefits Street has less in common with Cathy Come Home than, say, Made in Chelsea: it presents a world that appears to exist more or less in isolation from society at large, a bubble populated by exaggerated characters concerned only with their own egos.
The irony is that the truly savvy response to being filmed for a documentary is to play up to exactly this dynamic – to cultivate one’s own personality as an exploitable brand. You might get into I’m a Celebrity or Celebrity Big Brother and, even in these days of institutional implosion and zero-hour contracts, you can never be laid off from being you. Little surprise that, in its report based on the Birmingham Mail story, the Daily Mirror referred to Benefits Street’s subjects as its “stars”. Even when protesting exploitation and misrepresentation, those who appear on television are reflexively framed as media professionals in the making, potential celebrities, individuals par excellence.
