Cathy Come Home

A work of unquestionable importance in Ken Loach's filmography, the television drama Cathy Come Home (1966) was made for the BBC as part of the Wednesday Play series, which also included two other works by Loach: Up the Junction (1965) and The Big Flame (1969). In all of them we find some of the social, labour and family concerns that are characteristic of the director: the exploitation of unskilled workers, the poor conditions of wage labour, the struggle for survival and the cruel abandonment of the most disadvantaged by the government. But none of the episodes in the series had the same impact as Cathy Come Home, unanimously regarded as one of the most impactful works in the history of British television.

The film shows the irreparable breakdown of a family with three very young children after an accident at work leaves the father unemployed. From then on, the family loses the ability to afford their accommodation and moves inexorably towards a tragic situation. In 1966, a major mobilisation around the issue of social housing and how the government could intervene with low-income families was generated by the television broadcast of the story of Cathy, Reg and their children - narrated with a focus on Cathy, magnificently played by Carol White. The public's shock at Cathy's harrowing experience was such that it provoked a parliamentary debate on social housing policies in the UK, culminating in the abandonment of a terrible practice by British social services: the breaking up of families in poverty by placing only the mother and children, separated from the father, in precarious and overcrowded accommodation. In the film, Kenneth Loach shows us the devastating effects of this extremely violent practice, and moves us with another, even worse cruelty: the removal of Cathy's children by the social services on the grounds that they didn't have stable accommodation, an act of brutal violence perpetrated against a caring mother who was recognised by the social services themselves for her love of her children and her efforts to care for them as best she could.

Despite being a work of fiction, Cathy Come Home uses factual data about the housing crisis in Britain at the time. This data is presented to the viewer in a voiceover and even in a text that is superimposed over the final shots. It is this kind of objective voiceover that reframes the plot, creating a hybrid record between fiction and documentary. In addition, the use of the hand-held camera, the successive re-framings and the close-ups, filming strategies that we are more used to seeing in documentaries than in works of fiction, contribute to a genological ambivalence that today's viewers are much more used to dealing with.

The hybridity between the fictional plot and the documentary would prove crucial to the film's very strong moral sensitisation effect. Moreover, the film's impact was felt far beyond its direct audience, and even far beyond the 1960s. Suffice it to say that 50 years later, the International Journal of Housing Policy, published by Routledge, included in its 2016 issue 16:4 an article entitled "Fifty years since Cathy Come Home: critical reflections on the UK homelessness safety net".

It has been noted that Cathy Come Home (1966) and I, Daniel Blake (2016) form a diptych because together they provide an overview of British social services - and not just those social services - by showing the progressive degradation they have suffered, which has worsened since the 1980s. In a relatively recent debate, at the Cardboard Citizens theatre company's celebration of the film's 50th anniversary in 2016, Ken Loach argued that unlike Cathy Come Home, which alarmed people when they realised how easily a family with no major problems could be devastated by the housing crisis and the government's lack of response, today there seems to be a 'normalisation' of the lack of housing and the associated situations of social exclusion. True to his Marxist principles, the director condemned the "culture of conscious cruelty" so prevalent in today's world, and the replacement of public welfare with private greed. In his view, and rightly so, only government intervention can respond to this kind of inequality, while it is misleading to expect the market alone to solve a problem it has in fact created. Ken Loach reminds us that housing should be seen as a right for all.

You don't need to go any further to see how blatantly topical this film is. Unfortunately.