50 years on, Ken Loach’s Cathy Come Home is as pow­er­ful as ever

Fifty years ago today, approx­i­mate­ly 12 mil­lion view­ers tuned in to BBC1 on UK tele­vi­sion to watch Cathy Come Home. They would have had some idea of what to expect. The show was a week­ly instal­ment of The Wednes­day Play, an anthol­o­gy series renowned for its dar­ing sub­ject mat­ter and tack­ling social issues of the day. But few could have pre­dict­ed the impact that this par­tic­u­lar episode would have.

Writ­ten by Jere­my Sand­ford and direct­ed by a young Ken Loach, the sto­ry fol­lows young work­ing class girl Cathy (Car­ol White) whose opti­mism upon mov­ing to Lon­don, find­ing a job and falling in love spi­rals into despair when a series of unfor­tu­nate but painful­ly plau­si­ble set­backs leaves her home­less. First her hus­band Reg (Ray Brooks) los­es his job as a lor­ry dri­ver after sus­tain­ing an injury, which, coin­cid­ing with the birth of their first child, forces them to leave their fan­cy rent­ed stu­dio. Then, when their finan­cial sit­u­a­tion fails to improve and Cathy has anoth­er two chil­dren, they move between over­crowd­ed accom­mo­da­tion, car­a­vans, squats and home­less shel­ters, all at the mer­cy of heart­less land­lords and judge­men­tal locals, and in the vain hope that coun­cil hous­ing might become available.

Even­tu­al­ly, in a dev­as­tat­ing final scene, Cathy seeks shel­ter at Water­loo sta­tion with nowhere else to go. Social ser­vices turn up to forcibly take the chil­dren away from her amidst a cacoph­o­ny of heart­bro­ken screams.

View­ers were shocked, out­raged and deter­mined to do some­thing about the injus­tices they’d wit­nessed. BBC phone lines were inun­dat­ed with inquiries offer­ing help, many flocked to join char­i­ty for the home­less Shel­ter – which (coin­ci­den­tal­ly) launched just weeks after the broad­cast. The show was even dis­cussed in par­lia­ment. Overnight the issue of home­less­ness had become a nation­al con­ver­sa­tion, and influ­enced laws allow­ing hus­bands to accom­pa­ny their wife and chil­dren at home­less shel­ters (in the film, Reg is forced to find his own accom­mo­da­tion sep­a­rate­ly) and, even­tu­al­ly, the Hous­ing Act of 1977 (even if it didn’t ush­er in the larg­er struc­tur­al changes Loach longed for). How could a sin­gle episode of tele­vi­sion have such an impact?

Although still referred to as The Wednes­day Play, it was the char­ac­ter­is­tics that dis­tin­guished Cathy Come Home from the the­atre that was key to its suc­cess. First­ly was its reach. Unlike a play, where only a select few are able to get a tick­et, Cathy Come Home was beamed simul­ta­ne­ous­ly to rough­ly a quar­ter of the entire UK pop­u­la­tion. With most house­holds already hav­ing access to a tele­vi­sion, but hav­ing only three chan­nels to choose from, there had arguably nev­er been a time where one art-form could ben­e­fit from so much guar­an­teed exposure.

Recog­nis­ing the medi­um as a poten­tial vehi­cle for social change, Sand­ford and Loach set out to address the kind of issues that had hith­er­to been ignored by tele­vi­sion and tar­get­ed audi­ences’ sense of decen­cy and moral con­scious­ness. Sandford’s script cre­at­ed relat­able char­ac­ters with believ­able prob­lems, while an infor­mal first per­son nar­ra­tion from Cathy helped make her identifiable.

It was the nat­u­ral­is­tic direc­tion that real­ly got under the skin, how­ev­er. Most tele­vi­sion dra­mas at the time were filmed in stu­dios, but Loach, in the man­ner of the sim­i­lar­ly social­ly-real­ist kitchen sink dra­mas of the British New Wave, shot almost all of Cathy Comes Home out on the streets. He employed a cin­e­ma ver­ité aes­thet­ic, with many scenes being impro­vised and some mem­bers of the pub­lic being filmed unknow­ing­ly, all of which ampli­fied the action’s dis­con­cert­ing realism.

The effect was star­tling. Many view­ers con­fused the fic­tion for real­i­ty, and there were sto­ries that Car­ol White was approached in the street and offered mon­ey by mem­bers of the pub­lic believ­ing her to be Cathy. Some in the media were scan­dalised by its tech­niques, with a review in The Dai­ly Tele­graph accus­ing it of mis­lead­ing its view­ers by not mak­ing clear what was real and what wasn’t. But it was this nat­u­ral­is­tic style that was key to express­ing that this was a tele­vi­sion show about real people’s lives, peo­ple who were in urgent need of help.

Watch­ing Cathy Come Home today, it’s strik­ing just how famil­iar the con­cerns are. Where­as most pop cul­ture invites us to remem­ber 1960s Lon­don as a time of swing­ing hedo­nism and gar­ish chic depict­ed in works such as A Hard Day’s Night, it reminds us that beneath the glam­orous sheen the same prob­lems exist­ed. Cathy’s plight is one of a lack of afford­able or coun­cil hous­ing, and oth­er dis­grun­tled char­ac­ters place the blame on that all too famil­iar scape­goat – the migrant.

Loach con­tin­ues to make social­ly con­scious films, but for all praise and awards gar­nished on I, Daniel Blake, it’s unlike­ly it’ll have the same unique­ly-focused impact as Cathy. Per­haps the onus is now on a new gen­er­a­tion of artists to take his lead and find new out­lets to ensure that today’s injus­tices don’t go forgotten.