Revisiting ‘Cathy Come Home’ after half a century

Thanks to BBC iPlayer and some nostalgic programming choices by BBC Four, I finally got an opportunity to watch Cathy Come Home. It blew my mind a bit, and I felt compelled to write something about it—so here it is. In the interests of integrity, I will say that I cribbed a bunch of facts from Wikipedia for use below, and I’m not going to link or cite them individually.

Cathy Come Home in 1966

You can skip this section if you’re not interested in background. For those who don’t know, Cathy Come Home was a social drama written by Jeremy Sandford and directed by Ken Loach. It first aired in 1966 as part of a series of BBC ‘television plays’, and was watched by a quarter of the British population.

The reception was incredible: Cathy Come Home was adored by critics, the public, and film/TV industry professionals. It was still placing first and second in ‘all time’ polls well into the 2000s. Moreover, the film had a significant social impact: it has been credited with providing newly-formed homelessness charity Shelter with unexpectedly high levels of support, as well as being influential in the 1967 founding of another major housing charity, Crisis. It has even been suggested that the content led to one or two housing policies being changed.

Who the hell is Cathy?

The plot of Cathy Come Home is simple but effective. The story follows Cathy and Reg, a young couple who have a child and move in together. Reg is injured at work, losing his job and receiving no compensation, while Cathy is no longer at work due to the baby. This combination of events leads to the loss of his income, and in turn to their eviction.

Most of the film follows their attempts to resolve their homelessness one way or another: squatting, living in a caravan, living in a shelter, etc. Various tragedies befall them as they progress along this path—I‘ll try to avoid spoiling anything major, but I will discuss various scenes in some details below, so bear that in mind if you plan on watching it. Suffice to say that this is not a conventional Hollywood production with a heartwarming happy ending.

Breaking new ground

What can I say? This film is really pretty astounding, though some scenes are truly painful to watch. It’s almost difficult to believe it ever got made. Loach’s choices were totally unconventional at the time: filming on location, using handheld and hidden cameras, using a ‘drama documentary’ format, and more. Some confused critics praised the hard-hitting drama while turning their noses up at the supposed technical impropriety of Loach’s directing. In fact, the film’s style broke the mould so much that Carol White (Cathy) has claimed that people would recognise her in the street and try to give her money (believing she was genuinely homeless), even years afterwards.

While some viewers may have taken it a little too literally, the mixture of fact and fiction was based on solid and thorough research: the viewer is reminded of this when a voiceover periodically supplies real facts and figures (e.g. “There’s 60,000 single persons [in London]living without sinks or stoves”) and by the hard-hitting statement superimposed over Cathy’s face at the end of the film (“All the events in this film took place in Britain within the last eighteen months”).

Addressing race

Cathy Come Home was also politically charged and partisan in a way that it’s difficult to imagine the BBC would be comfortable with today. In one scene, a character blames the lack of housing on immigrants, only to have the authoritative voiceover point out that more people leave Britain than enter it each year. Sandford’s script is not merely an ideological screed, but nor does it feel the need to respect both sides of a debate when the facts can arbitrate. We are never encouraged to sympathise with racists, nor to see racism as something that people bring upon themselves by failing to ‘integrate’, being too forthright, etc.

This manoeuvre is an incredibly deft one, worthy of close consideration: Sandford depicts racism as an unfortunate aspect of the reality he aims to represent, while at the same time actively undermining it. Racism as a fact of working-class life is neither ignored nor legitimised when it is presented in this way—the phrase ‘warts and all’ springs to mind. The film’s deft treatment of race and racism is all the more impressive considering that this is a film about a White, British family.

Similarly, at another point Cathy and Reg are living in a caravan on common land, among a community of Travellers. Sandford exploits this circumstance to portray and discuss the conditions and treatment of Traveller communities. One short scene is devoted entirely to an Irish Traveller describing his hygiene practices in some detail to Reg, after complaining that people perceive him as “just a dirty old gypsy”. In another, Reg observes that the drivers who consider themselves too good to deliver fuel to the camp are “the same sort of people as we are.” Meanwhile, homeowners nearby express the opinion that the Travellers and the poor families living with them are simply “scroungers, layabouts… bloody vagabonds.”

At the same time, in keeping with the ‘warts and all’ approach, Sandford makes no attempt at whitewashing: other characters talking frankly about the rats that infest the camp, or the amount of rubbish lying around. Nor is the portrayal assimilationist—the Traveller tradition is bluntly asserted by two women, who discuss how they feel that they are more free and happy than they would be in houses. Even Cathy, who originally complains about the state of the camp, eventually says she was happy at the camp—but she is forced to move on.

Given this realistic but sympathetic assessment, it is hardly surprising that Sandford became a prominent friend of Traveller communities. His later work repeatedly documented Traveller lifestyles, and he was invited to edit Romani publications.

Social realism and the kitchen sink

The way that race figures in Cathy Come Home is in many ways a reflection of a wider commitment to boldly tackling social issues without flinching from the ugliness bound up in them, and in presenting a cast who acted like real people in real situations. In one scene, a hidden camera was even used to film the reactions of unknowing members of the public. Scenes often has to be completed in one take due to the way they were filmed. Cathy’s children were played by Carol White’s children.

Even the way the characters move and speak seems somehow more fundamentally true to life than many films. The fact that some scenes were improvised probably helped here, but Sandford’s writing and Loach’s desire to let people be real on camera are also crucial elements—actors mumble, or fluff their line mid-scene, because that is how people really speak, and it only works to make the experience more immersive and grounded.

Cathy Come Home understands the reality of poverty and homelessness, and never for a second feels like it is putting anything on or dressing anything up. At one point, Reg is unhelpfully told that “we have a welfare state now, so you can’t come to any real harm,” and looks unconvinced—of course, he is right to be. Almost all of the dramatic events that happen on-screen are dramatic events that occur every day (or did, at the time). It is a militant ‘kitchen sink drama’ that champions the perspective of the family torn apart by forces like capitalism, racism, bureaucracy, etc—and it is totally unashamed to be so.

Cathy Come Home in 2016

Few films are as ahead of their time and endure for as long as Cathy Come Home. Few films have an impact as great, and are as highly-regarded. That’s well-deserved. Sadly, it remains relevant half a century later, when the term ‘housing crisis’ is a very current part of our political vocabulary. If you haven’t seen it already, I highly recommend that you do it sometime. (At the time of writing, it’s on iPlayer for a few more days, but will then be gone, so get it while you can!)