Britain's Benefits Tenants; Going to the Dogs – TV review

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/jun/13/britains-benefits-tenants-tv-review

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It's becoming harder and harder to avoid poor people, isn't it? Not only do they keep bothering one on the street and on the train but now they're all over one's evening entertainment too. Pretty soon one is going to have to put spikes down on the television so they can't settle in.

Last night provided two windows on the lives of increasingly unquiet desperation amongst the dispossessed and disenfranchised. First came Britain's Benefits Tenants (Channel 4), showcasing the growing battle between private landlords (often people who have invested in property instead of a pension) and struggling, would-be-council-if-there-were-any-council-houses tenants who have to find rising rents out of diminishing benefits payments.

John-Paul, the managing director of Castledene lettings agency in Easington Colliery, Co Durham, specialises in this perennially fraught sector of the rental market. He grew up in the area, which perhaps explains his firm's unusually compassionate approach to their troubled and troublesome tenants. "We're 50-50 social workers and letting agents," says Bev, who along with her colleagues spends her days helping people fill in their benefit claim forms, encouraging them to access support services, chivvying them into paying up, cleaning up and – when necessary – shipping out. "I think we do a magnificent job," she says. "I'm very proud of what we do."

It's hard to disagree with her. Within the limits set by her job and the boundaries constantly drawn and redrawn by government policy, the Castledene staff deal firmly and patiently with people whose lives have been long out of control and who have little of the vital social or financial capital they need to change things. The problem was the problem there is with almost all these poverty porn-y programmes. They focus on individuals and individual stories and our sympathies and judgments are invited – occasionally, though not particularly here, manipulated – accordingly. The situation is effectively depoliticised – no wider context is shown, no bigger questions asked. It's an approach that results in condemnation or pity (and each ebbs and flows depending on whether you're watching a scene with an appalled owner looking at his or her devastated house or an alcoholic tenant, a favourite of Bev, wanting "peace, honest. In me life, I just want peace"), but whether this is a good thing, an insignificant one or an actively harmful level of disengagement with the causes and ramifications of such social divides, I can't be sure. But I suspect, increasingly strongly, that it's the last.

Many of the same issues hovered around Penny Woolcock's Cutting Edge documentary, Going to the Dogs (Channel 4), which explored the hidden world of dogfighting. Presented by Dylan Duffus, the actor and former gang member she got to know during the making of two earlier films, we were soon in the middle of the brutal business. The owners – balaclavaed, voice-masked – swore that the dogs loved it. The average viewer probably swore at the TV.

Woolcock picked away at the knotty mass of contradictory emotions and actions of those involved, for whom the dogs were part pet, part weapon, part currency and part proof of that separate, equally knotty mass of emotion and contradiction that makes up youth and masculinity.

Class distinctions and racial elements were teased out by interweaving the interviews with the dog owners and footage of their savage, bloody fights with scenes of battery farming, the shooting of racehorses and of Duffus and his friend and sound recordist, Cyrus, on a game shoot with a member of the huntin', shootin', fishin' and endlessly brayin' classes. "Cartridge for the partridge!" he guffawed, and brought a cock and hen down. "First time," said Cyrus wryly, "I've stood by a live shotgun and no crime's been committed." It was a perfect summary of what it means to have power, now and historically, and the benefits that accrue when you and your ilk get to define the terms on which everyone must live.

By the end, Duffus had been more than slightly persuaded of the dogs' appetite for the fight ("I don't think it's wrong … it's their natural instinct") but for Cyrus "this dingy, sweaty, filthy atmosphere and blood and shit and tears and whimpering dogs – that ain't my thing." This viewer at least was on Cyrus's side.

Going to the Dogs was undoubtedly a better, more contextualised look than most at how poverty and lack of opportunity can brutalise people – although it fought a little shy of examining how great a part ethnic and cultural traditions may play (though I suppose you could argue that dogfighting is a spectator sport primarily in places where poverty and lack of opportunity defines the nation rather than simply some demographics within it). Whether these wider issues will make it into what is bound to be outraged and horrified discussion of the animal suffering on show, we shall see.