Greg Dixon: Poverty porn that tugs at the heartstrings

Ageing addict Fungi is one of the mix of characters who make up the community on Birmingham's 'Benefits Street'.

There is a sense of invasion of privacy, and that you shouldn't be watching it. But Benefits Street is weirdly uplifting television, too.

Poverty is politics. But should it be entertainment? Actually make that, should it be take-the-phone-off-the-hook, can't-bare-to-miss-it entertainment?

It would be fair to say that I've been riven while watching the reality television series Benefits Street (8.30pm, Wednesdays, TV One). And I'm not alone.

It is perhaps the most controversial programme to screen in Britain this year, generating close to a thousand complaints to that country's broadcasting watchdog, Ofcom, and has been the subject of questions in Britain's Parliament. It was excoriated by some television critics and political commentators as "poverty porn", while a number of Benefits Street's participants have said they were lied to by the programme's makers. Meanwhile Channel Four, which screened it in Britain, responded to the hundreds of complaints it received by running an hour-long panel discussion about poverty and other issues raised by the programme immediately after the final episode.

If you haven't watched it yet - and I am certainly recommending you catch up on the first two episodes on TVNZ Ondemand before watching the remaining three over the coming weeks - the series is simple enough: it's about one street, James Turner St, in a suburb called Winson Green in the central English city of Birmingham. There are 99 houses in James Turner St. There are two-parent families. There are single-parent families. There are people of 13 different nationalities. There is even a prison at the end of the street.

But this isn't why the programme's makers set up shop for a year of filming. The reason they and we are in James Turner St is that 90 per cent of the people living there are receiving some kind of welfare payment.

The first episode opened as the British Government was cutting benefits as part of its post-2008, financial crisis-provoked "austerity programme" and the residents we met in the first show, just a half a dozen or so, were reacting to the loss of income in different ways. Single mother "White" Dee - the biggest presence on the show and in the street - was philosophical but defiant. "Black" Dee seemed to fall to bits as she fell behind in rent and received an eviction notice from her landlord. Others, specifically "Fungi", an ageing drug and alcohol addict, and his younger criminal mate Danny, viewed the cuts as a reason to keep doing what they were doing: shoplifting, grifting and getting high. Most problematically we got to see quite a bit of how they did just that: Danny showed us how to make a carry bag that would jam shop theft detectors, while Fungi demonstrated how he nicked free magazines from a cheap hotel and then pretended he was a homeless person flogging The Big Issue for spare change. He made £12 ($24). Danny stole a bunch of coats (the theft wasn't filmed) and flogged them on for £200. It was a tidy day's work. Theft isn't the only crime on the show. We briefly visit a spare room being used to grow dope (the crop was later filched by Danny). And this week's second issue concentrated on other sorts of wrongdoing: racism and the exploitation of immigrants.

If this all sounds very much like Benefits Street is poverty porn with a large side of criminality, it probably is.

But the programme offers some insight too into the experiences of individuals making the best of circumstances most citizens of an advanced democracy have not or would not wish to experience. There is poverty and crime. It is harrowing and awful to watch. There is a sense of invasion of privacy, and that you shouldn't be watching it. But Benefits Street is weirdly uplifting television, too.

There will be people who will hate Benefits Street because they hate the type of people who live there: people on benefits, people who are poor. But thanks to some of the folk living on James Turner St I reckon this series has more heart than most reality television, no matter how complicated, controversial and downright awful some of its content is.

- TimeOut