Today sees the fortieth anniversary of one of the BBC’s most well-known TV dramas, Cathy Come Home. Written by Jeremy Sandford and directed by Ken Loach, it is often credited with leading to the creation of homeless charity Shelter — although, as noted on the Guardian’s new TV blog, in reality it coincided with the nascent charity’s launch, and certainly helped foster an unprecedented level of awareness that meant the charity grew in size and stature much more quickly.
In another of our occasional digs through the Television Today archives, we bring you the original review of Cathy Come Home, written by one Michael Billington (who is now theatre critic of the Guardian):
Powerful and sombre piece
BY MICHAEL BILLINGTON
The barrier that separates television drama from documentary has been slowly crumbling for a long time now. After last night’s BBC1 Wednesday play, Cathy Come Home by Jeremy Sandford, it should have more or less caved in completely. The play dealt with the problem of a homeless family, and although the characters were fictitious, everything that happened to them had been observed by the author at first hand. All told, it made a powerful, sombre piece of television but it left me wondering whether this type of factual drama was the best way of getting to the heart of social problems.
The basic story line was fairly simple. Cathy (Carol White) and Reg (Ray Brooks) fell in love, got married and took a flat. As they were earning about £35 a week between them, life held few economic problems. But Cathy became pregnant, Reg had an accident and was forced to live off his sickness benefit and, financially, the pressure was on. The couple tried living with in-laws but that didn’t work; were evicted from a tumbledown flat after the death of the owner; saw the caravan they had bought razed to the ground; and ended up with Cathy in a hostel and Reg in digs. Under the weight of all this, the marriage broke up, the children were taken away by the state and Cathy returned disconsolately home.
Quite obviously, Mr. Sandford feels deeply angry both about the arrangements we make for homeless couples and for the fact they exist at all. “They’re casualties of the Welfare State,” says someone. “They’re pushed around like so much human litter.” On the evidence offered, I take this to be true and I deplore it as much as Mr. Sandford does, but what weakened his attack on the system as a whole was his apparent unwillingness to admit that his central couple were also to blame for their condition. This lack of objectivity is perfectly acceptable in a dramatist but less so in someone framing an indictment of part of the social set-up.
Still, the play did force one to take notice of an urgent human problem and it was also directed by Kenneth Loach with an admirable mixture of technical elan and feeling for the subject. Slum squalor, for instance, was shown for what it really is without being turned into something visually picturesque.
The direction also showed a simple concern for people: there was one particularly haunting shot of the face of an old man dissolving into tears on being told that he was to be sent to a home. At the same time, the desire for realism was carried a bit too far, with the soundtrack often achieving authenticity at the expense of audibility. As for the cast, one can only pay them the high compliment of saying that one accepted them as ordinary, everyday people rather than paid-up Equity members.
Cathy Come Home remains one of the most famous of all the BBC’s political dramas of the 1960s (covered in a recent BBC Four documentary, which I talked about — and repeated the erroneous Shelter claim — in this blog article from August).
And what of today’s political dramas? If we ignore the action-adventure heroics of Spooks or The State Within, we’re pretty much left with clumsy war metaphors in Robin Hood and a storyline in Casualty…
