Cathy Come Home
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Cathy Come Home is a British television play, first broadcast on November 16, 1966 on BBC1. Running to eighty minutes, the play was shown in the BBC's The Wednesday Play anthology strand, which was well known for tackling sensitive social issues, and Cathy Come Home was no exception. It remains one of the most famous one-off dramas in UK television history.
Filmed in a grittily realistic drama documentary style, the play tells the story of a young couple, Cathy (played by Carol White) and Reg (Ray Brooks). Initially their relationship flourishes, they have a child and move into a happy modern home, but when Reg suffers an injury and loses his job and they are evicted, their lives spiral downwards through a process of unemployment, squatting, eviction and care homes. Finally, in a gripping final sequence filmed as-real with the cameras out of view on a suburban street in front of astonished passers-by, Cathy has her children forcibly taken away from her by the social services.
The play was watched by 12 million people — a quarter of the British population at the time — on its first broadcast and proved to be hugely significant, alerting a mass audience to everyday problems faced by thousands of people in the UK and bringing attention to subjects that had not previously been widely discussed in the popular media. It provoked a wide-ranging debate on the issues of homelessness and unemployment, and the rights of mothers to keep their own children, and is often cited as one of the major factors behind changes in law and social trends in the UK regarding these issues. It also helped raise the profile of the new homeless charity Shelter, which was coincidentally launched two weeks after the film was first broadcast.
The play was written by Jeremy Sandford, produced by Tony Garnett and directed by Ken Loach, who went on to become a major figure in British film. Loach employed a realistic documentary style, using predominantly 16mm film on location, which contrasted with the vast amount of BBC drama of the time which was commonly shot in studios on videotape. This realistic style very much helped heighten the impact of the piece, particularly the scene in which Cathy and Reg are forcibly evicted with their children by bailiffs from the home in which they have been unable to keep up rent payments. This powerful sequence, largely improvised, is often repeated in the UK in documentaries both about television history and the 1960s in general.
In a 2000 poll of industry professionals conducted by the British Film Institute to determine the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes of the 20th century, Cathy Come Home was voted into second position, the highest-placed drama on the list, behind only Fawlty Towers overall. In 2003, it was released on VHS and DVD by the BFI as part of their Archive Television range but is now out of print. In 2006 the film was re-shown, for the first time in many years, on BBC4 as part of a series of programmes highlighting the plight of the homeless.
