Cathy Come Home

In 1966 it would be hard to envisage that Cathy Come Home was in fact a single play produced by the BBC. It was produced in a drama documentary style.

Upon its broadcast it was controversial as director Ken Loach was accused of mixing facts with fiction. The film led to the setting up of the charity Shelter and eventually led to the reform of housing protection laws in the UK.

Loach examines the plight of the homeless and how institutions that are meant to help end up being a hindrance that in reality break up families.

Cathy (Carol White) comes to London and meets Reg (Ray Brooks). They get married and have children. Reg has a nice job and they get on the housing ladder but when Reg has an accident at work and goes on benefits they go on a downward spiral of looking somewhere to live. Each time the housing is worse quality and its a vicious circle that they cannot break out of. In those days, people would not rent to those who had children, being homeless with young kids did not give you priority and it seems there was not enough housing at all.

As the film goes on we see familiar attitudes to the homeless situation, that it is their own fault, they are feckless, it is the fault of the immigrants who have come here from Jamaica and taken housing from the white folks.

In 1966 this would had been a shocking and provocative film. Carol White was a beautiful actress and we can see her eventually being ground down as her situation becomes hopeless. The final scenes of her losing her kids have still not lost impact 50 years on.

I have seen several excerpts from and read reviews on this film, but as a mother - I don't think I could watch this film from start to finish. I have seen this drama-documentary featured twice on shows such as Top 50 most emotional TV moments and again tonight on Top 50 best TV dramas (UK). I've looked up info and was just wondering if anyone (from across the water :) ) can confirm that some of "Cathy's" children,(child-actors in the film) had actually been taken into care, in reality.. I seem to remember a mention of something like that on one of those shows. I don't recall exactly, but seem to remember somebody speaking of a direct connection / link, of this sort.

• it's playing on my mind - if anyone can put me out of my misery-?

What to say about this one? Heartbreaking, bleak, hopeless take on unemployment and overpopulation in England. It's not overindulging, it's not constructed, it just is, which makes it even worse to watch.

Basically you'll be watching the slow disintegration of this young couple that falls in love and tries to start a family. What begins as a love story, ends up exposing a social security system, completely incapable of handling the overpopulation, or the people it affects.

It's depression in film form. But to Loach's great credit, the point, the punch of this movie, never feels strained. If you liked this (if you thought it was good that is), My Name is Joe could be next Loach film you should look into.

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning

Reg (Ray Brooks) and Cathy (Carol White) are young and in love, and eventually get married and have children. Reg has a good job, and all is going swimmingly, until he has an accident at work and his bosses refuse to pay him compensation. Unable to keep up with payments after the death of their landlady, they find themselves forced out of their home, and down into a never-ending spiral of increasingly unsuitable, uninhabitable temporary accommodation and bureaucracy that drives them apart and leaves Cathy in despair.

Last year, after announcing his retirement after making his last film (2014's Jimmy's Hall) Ken Loach surprised everyone and, as if to prove why celebrities should never use the word retirement, at the age of eighty made the incredibly well received I, Daniel Blake. But it also marked fifty years since his arguably most ground breaking, heavily impacting work premiered on TV, in the shape of this low scale production, that shone a light on the dire state of homelessness at the time, and actually brought about the formation of the charity Shelter, as well as significant changes in the law. Truly a testament to the power of film at its strongest...

It's ostensibly a drama, grounded in the cold, gritty reality of life, but depicting the bleak chain of events as it does, in its own way, it ends up playing out like an archetypal horror film, with the lead protagonists trapped in a chain of events forged by external forces that threaten to destroy them and everything they hold dear. The monster chasing them is the unrelenting, stony faced bureaucracy and prejudice of society and institutions, from which survival seems impossible. Loach further achieves this effect with the style he employs in the film, with the black and white frame that was still fairly typical at the time, and the various, opposing voice-overs, including the lead characters, that add to the eerie, isolating feel of it all.

A young pretender at the time it was made, Loach set his standard with this short, unsettling piece. His job is not to make entertaining films, or to make us happy, but to inform and provoke change with gritty, social realism. As he reminds us before the film finishes, everything that we've just seen really happened over the then last six months in Britain, so it's not like he doesn't do his homework. Regardless of your political persuasion, his sincerity to highlight what many more powerful people paper over is always to his credit. *****

Firstly can I please put the record straight - this is NOT a movie, but a TV drama made by the BBC in 1966.

Carol White plays "Cathy", the mother, Ray Brooks the father. Through circumstances they find themselves destitute with nowhere to live.

Carol White's performance was absolutely without parallel, and I defy anyone who is a parent, to remain dry-eyed when the Social Welfare people find her seated on a bench with her children in a London railway station. The children are wrenched out of their mother's arms, the children screaming for their mother, and "Cathy" hysterical with emotion, trying to prevent their removal. How could we ever have lived with such a barbaric system? This drama served as a landmark in Social Services methods within the UK, and Carol White's superb portrayal will forever be regarded as instrumental in bringing about change.

I would like to be able to report that such things no longer happen in the UK, but I cannot. Perhaps in not such a heart-wrenching way, children are still removed from their families on the pretext of "child welfare" priorities. Priorities that are distorted by the setting of Government adoption targets - so just who is helping who here?

This is not family viewing, but is an important historical account of a time that none of us should be proud.