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Forty years after Cathy Come Home, the BBC's shocking film about homelessness, the station is confronting the issue again. As our government gears up to end homelessness by 2012, we find out if television can still change the world
Colin Firth will soon appear in the television equivalent of a Trojan horse. The Hollywood actor, famous for smouldering in that wet shirt in Pride and Prejudice as well as getting the girl in Bridget Jones' Diary, says his next project will be a surprise akin to a hidden army of Santa's elves climbing out of the Christmas presents. A new production, to be broadcast by the BBC in the run-up Christmas, it will bring stars like Firth, Robert Carlyle and former Shameless actress Anne-Marie Duff into the warm, festive living rooms of television fans.
Many of them, no doubt, will be expecting a wee smoulder or a bumbling joke from Firth: a good laugh before the holidays begin. But they'll be disappointed.
acclaimed Dominic Savage (Love and Hate, Out of Control) the film has been commissioned to mark the 40th anniversary of ground-breaking docudrama Cathy Come Home, the film that shocked 1960s Britain into confronting the grim reality of homelessness and led to the formation of housing and homelessness charity Shelter.
Firth is looking forward to raising some eyebrows. "If the audience tuning in to see me are expecting a romantic comedy then that would be great," he says. "I think all the cast would be thrilled by that kind of surprise. Personally, I don't want to be condemned to romantic comedies for the rest of my career. I like participating in something that goes into different territory."
Firth plays a businessman in the throes of a mid-life crisis who, after an attack of guilt, decides to help the homeless. He says his celebrity could be useful tool in encouraging the audience to deal with the tricky social problems behind the drama.
"There's something about familiarity which makes people engage. It's not just a man in a suit with crisis. It's him. I know him. It's his crisis. If people go with it, and sympathise with it, that might take them a bit further than they might otherwise might have."
When it comes to people living on the streets, part of the problem is that it's generalised in people's minds. The suspicion and fear and hatred can only be preserved if they don't know any individuals in that position." People stop hating a social group when they make contact."
Public outcry
Usually, nobody expects a television drama, especially one broadcast at Christmas time, to do more than keep the family's bums on the sofa for a few hours. But not every drama was commissioned to commemorate the anniversary of Cathy Come Home. That docu-drama, the first of its kind directed by a young Ken Loach, was broadcast in 1968 to a quarter of Britain's people. It appalled millions, leading to a political outcry that succeeded in provoking real social change.
Born Equal, too, aims to be an out-of-the-ordinary piece of work; no scripts were given to the all-star cast and the actors were expected to improvise the dialogue interacting with both actors and, like Cathy Come Home, real people who were homeless for many different reasons.
Director Dominic Savage says he wanted to produce a piece that was as true to life as it could be. Asked by the BBC to come up with a drama around homelessness he was quickly drawn to the lives of people living in homeless hostels and temporary accommodation. It's a story plucked from today's society - here in Scotland, as property prices continue to soar, 8,135 households, both individuals and families, are currently living in unsuitable temporary accommodation. But Savage says it will be difficult for his drama to emulate the success of Loach's Cathy Come Home.
"I don't think it can have that same impact. When Cathy Come Home was broadcast people weren't used to shocking material but now we're exposed to it all the time. It's a very difficult thing to shock people, to make them think differently or to change people. All you can do is make something that engages people, makes them think about others a bit more, makes them think about the injustice and inequalities in society and hope that people care a bit more about those who are less fortunate than them."
The issues facing homeless people have, in some senses, changed since the 1960s and Savage was keen to tell a new story. He says that hostels, and the events in people's lives that have led them to be there, were both the most "dramatically interesting" and the best way to expose the social inequalities in modern Britain.
"It's the idea of the journey to that hostel and why those people fall from grace. Something can go wrong in someone's life, suddenly they find themselves without a home, and that's interesting," he explains.
Falling from grace
Born Equal's plot - weaving in asylum seekers, battered mothers and recently released prisoners, all sectors of the population routinely in danger of becoming homeless - shows there are as many ways to "fall from grace" as there are people in the world. Homelessness has never been simply about bricks and mortar, as the old soundbite goes. Savage hopes his work will encourage his audience to think a little bit harder about their own lives.
"Anyone with any sense realises that all our lives are fragile and it doesn't take much for us to upset that balance and for us to be left in a desperate situation," Savage says. "That's what stirred me to make it.
"We live in our own bubbles. We just think everything's alright and we get locked into our own world. Lets break out of those bubbles and see what happens when people do. But, of course, there are no easy answers." Encouraging an audience to break out of their bubble is no mean feat, and Savage says he is glad to have his "extremely gifted" big name cast. He's hoping the draw of celebrity will bring an unexpected audience to his film where, the "Trojan horse" will both shock, surprise and fascinate.
"When you make something as dark as this then it's a difficult, emotional and harrowing journey. If you want to get an audience for this sort of thing you want to make it as attractive as possible to people. Those actors are very fine and talented and that was the reason for choosing them. But they are also the actors that people want to see.
"They allow people to come into a film such as this where they might have avoided it otherwise. It might be relegated to a late night slot if it was full of newcomers. You don't want that, you want to be in there and get as big as possible an audience watching it. You forget they're stars after a bit and you get on board with them as characters.
"It's an ambitious piece. I wanted to make a film that dealt with the huge divide between the people that have and the people that don't. It's by showing that contrast, that huge gulf, you can show people it's not right."
But can a bunch of celebrities in a TV drama really make people care? After all, homelessness isn't just a convenient background to filmmaker's story, it's a real and damaging social ill. According to Shelter, who this week marked the anniversary of Cathy Come Home with a reminder about the problems of homelessness today, Scotland is in the middle of a housing crisis. In 2005/06, 39,923 households were homeless.
Shelter claim nearly 30,000 children are homeless, most of them living in unsuitable temporary accommodation. At a screening of the 60s film this week, Shelter Scotland head Archie Stoddart called for more housing to be built to meet demand - and for continuing commitment from government and councils to reach the 2012 deadline set to end homelessness.
"You can hope that this drama will help but I don't think it will," says Anne Marie Duff. "I don't think people give a shit anymore. I'm a storyteller. You like to feel you've got some power some of the time, maybe, to change things or make people more aware. I just think a lot of people think the world is a ghastly place but don't act upon things."
Duff says audiences, like the society they live in, have changed since Cathy Come Home was broadcast 40 years ago.
"I think people have got less of a sense of community than they did in the 60s," she says. "I think we've been encouraged to be insular and not involve ourselves in other people's problems. There is a strange terror that if we do then they'll permeate and become part of your life."
Duff plays a heavily pregnant young woman who, with her child in tow, has run away from an abusive partner. Many of her scenes were shot in public places where passers by didn't know she was an actress in costume. It was an experience she found harrowing. "I stood in two railway stations: one in Basildon and one in Kings Cross. I was standing there with a child who was six years old, I had a big bloody lip, I had an eight-month pregnant belly on me, crying my eyes out.
"Nobody stopped. You think in your head there's no way you'd see a pregnant women with a kid and not say 'excuse me, love, are you alright' but they do," she says. "People walk past all the time.
A call for motivation
She says that reaction from the public made her feel ashamed. "They looked at me with disgust. We [actors] are usually woolly liberals. We like to think that we don't judge people, anyway, but I'm sure it's given me an insight. There's no way it couldn't. People do look at you like you're some sort of stain and you've spoiled their day. I found that really shocking."
Although unsure of the reaction Born Equal will provoke and - like the rest of the cast and the director - unhappy with it being measured against Cathy Come Home, Duff isn't completely despondent. She says there is no point in giving in.
"You just hope that a project like this will motivate somebody, somewhere, who has any kind of power to address the housing situation. It's a problem people need to know more about because if they can't see it then it doesn't affect them. The audience, because of the actors that are involved, will think 'oooh, I'll watch that because so-and-so's involved'.
"I'm hoping we'll get an audience you wouldn't expect."
Born Equal will be screened on BBC1 on December 17 at 9pm
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