Drayton: Scunthorpe
Scunthorpe has been on the telly. There’s a show on C4 called Skint. It purports to take an in depth look at life for those who have no money, either through their own feckless natures or due to their own feckless natures. Of course it’s not. It’s rubber necking. With Finchy from The Office doing the voice over.
I’m from Scunthorpe, and having not lived there for 30 years am perfectly placed to make comment on the show and the people represented therein. Well, as much as the muppets who found the damaged goods from off the estate to parade on the telly are.
There’s Dean, who had 23 years employment spunked away because the steel works shut down and is now buying hooky chickens from the back of a car. He likes a drink and he loves his kids. There’s Connor a kid so in need of some serious guidance and help it’s heart-breaking, but what does he get instead? A spot on primetime TV so the cyber trolls can have a field day and the limelight, which enables him to play out his Britain’s Got Ne’er Do Wells fantasy whilst shouting “Fuck Da Police”, like a North Lincolnshire N.W.A.
Then there’s Jemila a 16 year old who lives in a doss house so rank you wouldn’t let your woodlice rent a room there. She’s no angel, but she’s got her head screwed on. She had a baby at 15. It was taken away. She has absolutely no hope in getting her back while she lives with crack addicts, pit bulls and filth. It’s fucking heart breaking.
And yet, and yet, the armchair critics are wading in, the cyber trolls are rounding on these people, these people who through circumstance and general fuckery have become our underclass. No, I wouldn’t want them living next door to me, that’s why I live in the North East, we don’t have poverty up here. I do however hope that I would treat them with a little more respect than those who think that because they have the internet they’re well placed to pour scorn and hatred their way, they are worthless scum after all.
Those without sin and all that….
Mr Drayton’s Record Player is at the Tyneside Cinema every Thursday. The needle drops at 7.15pm, and tickets are a fiver. Click to buy tickets.
