1. Cathy Come Home (1966)
Devastating television play featuring the misfortunes of Cathy. We see her as a young carefree girl and observe her romance with Reg. They get married. Reg has a good job and they rent a house and have a son. Unfortunately Reg loses his job due to an accident and this entails losing his house. Cathy has had two more children and the family begin a grim downward spiral of increasingly unpleasant domestic arrangements. They get evicted from the slums, they are burnt out of a caravan and finally Cathy gets a place at a hostel. The living conditions are dreadful and Reg is not allowed in to see her or the kids. Whenever her time is up at the hostel, in extremely harrowing scenes, Social Services take away Cathy's children. Her fate is unclear. A quarter of the British public watched Cathy Come Home whenever it was broadcasted on the Wednesday Play slot on BBC 1. The docu-film stunned the Nation. Homelessness had never really been a topic for national debate. Many were in ignorance of the scale of the problem and the miserable circumstances in which young couples like Cathy and Reg find themselves in. These were not drunken bums. They were ordinary people who had been dealt a terrible hand in the game of fate. The charity Crisis was formed the next year out of the rubble of Cathy Come Home. I watched the film for the second time last night. Its documentary style in which people who have really experienced hardship and homelessness lend narration and their own experiences to the film, really packs a punch to the gut. This film is the ultimate example of British social realism. It is impossible not to be affected by it, even all these years later.