Skint, BBC
Skint is a BBC project made up of seven monologues, each one focusing on a different characters’ bleak struggle against the grip of poverty.
What you’ll realise early on when watching, is that this series is theatre, more than it is TV. The majority of the monologues rely on the central characters’ performance and dialogue to hold your attention, and only one makes use of the tricks of television.
The first episode, I’d Like to Speak to the Manager is the only one of seven monologues that contains a televisual twist through flashback as we are cleverly indulged in what a waitress might do if she had the audacity to respond to the catchphrase of every stuck up “Karen”.
Saoirse-Monica Jackson’s (Derry Girls) performance, and the twist in this vignette, are not the only things likely to stick in your head by the end of the series. There are a few great performances, in fact pretty much every central performance has something. Actors from Shane Meadows’ working-class TV and Film canon pop up in the form of Michael Socha (This is England) and Peter Mullan (Tyrannosaur) proving how unique and underrepresented their voices are.
Speaking of underrepresented voices, Skint commits to showcasing accents from around the UK, a further reminder of how little our TV drama features the voices of authentic Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish characters.
There might be a reason why poverty isn’t talked about too much in TV and Film, though. Skint staunchly shows us how bleak the subject is, fleshing out each characters’ anxiety, trauma, entrapment and sense of injustice created by lack of money. Children are the perennial victims of nearly all of these stories and being confronted with it leaves a horrible taste in your mouth.
This is not a light TV series that relies on spectacle. It’s a gritty, unflinching look at the horror of poverty, told in a stripped down, theatrical format. Unless you want to be reminded of the responsibility we all have for dealing with poverty, you might want to stick with Peaky Blinders.
