....were really unbalanced, using anecdote and subjectivity to re present Alf Garnett in the 21st century, rather than to understand with sensitivity, a wider process of change in work which affects every class and background but particularly people who don't own their own homes and haven't benefitted from the sale of council houses, the buy to let economy and paying for a degree or professional education.

These programmes should have researched work, its meaning over time for all participants in the documentary.

Was any analysis done of how working class should be defined? What kinds of jobs? What kinds of contracts? Really, these documentaries looked superficially at the effects of creating an underclass but didn't look at that underclass and why it has become easier and easier to report them as adolescents who binge drink and have no self control. If you're assuming 'working' in your documentary then you really need to explore what 'working' means.

There is an unrelenting hunt for unbalanced stories about the people who've been structurally excluded from becoming anything but benefit fodder in the buy to let economy with their only choice being very cheap and unsustaining labour. The documentaries only looked at established white cores of life in predominantly aging groups of people and then placed that against a defensive view of new immigrants which was patronising to them and to everyone in the programmes. It would have been much more interesting to look at how work has changed for everyone, how reluctance of councils to challenge landlords and developers, to rehabilitate their housing stocks and really ensure that agency and gang working if neccessary, at least allows a decent quality of life. This could make a real difference to community relations.

While we tolerate an underclass in Britain we are manipulating and brutalising a goup of people who are structurally always in the wrong and therefore, cannot move without making a mistake in the way they live, work, bring up their children, socialise.

(The documentaries didn't touch on how much earned and unearned income has been generated from this underclass by unscrupulous landlords, employers and institutions in the last thirty years and how this has undermined trust and confidence between individuals and groups, for example).