Something tells me that not many social workers will have enjoyed The Unloved (Sunday 17 May, 9pm, Channel 4), the actor Samantha Morton’s directorial debut, though their cries of indignation have perhaps been muffled by the origins of the script, which drew heavily on the director’s own experiences.
Placed in local authority care as a baby, Morton remained in the system until she was 16. Her film, which told the story of a week in the life of an abused and neglected girl, Lucy, was not just another piece of politically motivated social-worker bashing, but the testimony of a survivor, which meant that it was safe not to take it with too hefty a pinch of salt.
In The Unloved, the better social workers were neither lazy nor rabid, but slaves to budgets, paperwork and a blithe kind of jargon, one of them even explaining to 11-year-old Lucy (Molly Windsor) that she hadn’t been around much because her petrol money had not been paid.
As for the worst, they were as chaotic and immature as those in their care, the implication being that, in social work as in everything, you get what you pay for.
At the children’s home where Lucy pitched up, having been beaten yet again by her father, the carers partied with their charges like overgrown teenagers. One regularly had sex with an older girl, sneaking under her duvet at night as if the two of them were merely enjoying an old-fashioned youth hostelling weekend.
If all this was designed to make the viewer boil with fury, it worked, or it did in my case. Yet it rarely felt manipulative.
As a director, Morton was determined to work mostly at knee height, regarding the action only from the vantage point – or disadvantage point – of a child.
We saw the system working in much the same way as Lucy saw it: careless (what an ironic word), noisy, unstoppable, unfathomable. A lot of the time, I wanted nothing so much as to put my fingers in my ears and wait until the latest screaming row – or the latest spouted platitude – was over.
Morton had landed a star turn in Windsor, a young actor with an amazing ability to convey both stillness and sadness, and with a slow, steady blink that could break your heart at ten paces, but she was undoubtedly helped by a dressing-up box of physical detail that could surely only have come from the director herself.
Lucy walked on tiptoe, as if her shoes were too small, and she never wore a coat because no one had ever thought to buy her one, so she was often shivery; at night, she took off her socks – once white, but now increasingly grey – and laid them carefully over her shoes till morning, the memory of her feet inside them living on too long in their shape on account of the fact that they now needed washing so badly.
There was a piercing dignity and self-containment to everything she did, and it took you inside her head better than a thousand lines.
The Unloved comes fast on the heels of Endgame, a Channel 4 film about the talks that began the end of apartheid, and Red Riding, its three-part adaptation of David Peace’s West Yorkshire novels.
While all of these have had serious flaws – The Unloved, like Endgame, occasionally forgot that it was drama rather than documentary; Red Riding was more of a duplicitous muddle than most critics were willing to admit at the time – there is no doubting the investment that went into them in other respects: leading directors, starry casts (in The Unloved, Lucy’s father was played by Robert Carlyle), publicity blitzes worthy of a Hollywood studio.
At first sight, it seems hard to believe these dramas came from the same network that brings us Gok’s Fashion Fix, Extreme Male Beauty, Man Hunters: Our Turkish Toy Boys and Kirstie’s Homemade Home – surely one of the most risible and badly timed home shows ever made.
But there is one link, of course. The influence of reality television has been so insidious that now drama, too, must include an element of “truth”, a basis in “real” events. Even Red Riding, with its preposterous depiction of 1970s police corruption, featured a serial killer widely regarded as a version of the Yorkshire Ripper.
When I try to think of a recent Channel 4 drama that is pure fiction – a conjuring act of words and imagination – my mind remains puzzlingly blank. Up next? A film in which Julie Walters will play the Labour politician Mo Mowlam.
Still, it remains increasingly difficult to explain Channel 4’s apparent split personality.
For all that a lucrative commercial partnership with BBC Worldwide is said to be just “weeks away”, the network is mired in financial difficulties, its chief executive, Andy Duncan, talking of a funding gap of £150m by 2012.
This year, it faces a drop in advertising revenue of almost £120m, and is to make £75m worth of cuts to its programmes budget; the channel that once paid £1m per episode for Desperate Housewives will be buying no more US shows at all.
Yet Duncan still makes a point of praising projects such as Red Riding, while his director of content, Kevin Lygo, insists that Channel 4’s drama output will not be cut, despite the temptation to do so: “There’s no doubt if you take millions of pounds out [of the budget] the drama is the place you go to, because obviously you think, for a few hours, you can save millions of pounds. But at the moment we are doing as much – just about – as next year.”
I don’t believe that either of these men would put his creative instincts above commercial ones (and anyway, Duncan is a marketing guy, not a programme-maker). We must assume, therefore, that one of them – and there has long been rumoured to be tension between the two – is unwilling to give up on the idea of the Channel 4 brand, so long associated with a certain kind of independent film-making.
The Unloved, part of Channel 4’s Forgotten Children season, belongs to a rich tradition: the channel virtually invented the “stranded” (that is to say, themed) programming on which BBC4, and others, are now so cleverly reliant. Its very first broadcast drama, in 1982, was Stephen Frears’s Walter, a film about mental illness and the way society treats its sufferers, which was considered shocking at the time.
Someone at Channel 4 is playing an admirably long game; as ITV will eventually discover, go too downmarket now, and it will be extremely difficult to respond, creatively speaking, to any upturn in the commercial climate.
So, in this sense, I am prepared to stomach the rising levels of dross at Channel 4. If Kirstie Allsopp and her pathetic attempts to learn to sew a quilt – “Now, you’ve kindly agreed to finish it for me, haven’t you, Mr Artisan?” – is, in effect, buying us drama such as The Unloved, then I’ll put up with her.
But such tolerance cannot be extended indefinitely, and there are limits.
So, you have dedicated a season to the terrible plight of the 71,476 children who are in care in Britain. This doesn’t absolve you from the shame of sending some oafish presenter to test gadgets for improving penis size.
If anything, it only heightens it: you, of all people, really should know better.
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