Benefits Street

Overview

Benefit Street, a controversial 'fly-on-the-wall' documentary series was filmed for over a year on James Tuner Street, Birmingham, the series is a rad and challenging watch at times but it documents the honest reality of what happened over those 12 months.

Decoding Benefits Street 

How Britain was divided by a television show

Thanks to social media, the now not-so-silent majority of "hardworking families" dutifully pipe along with the right, cocooned in the knowledge that there are people - and British people, not just Romanian immigrants - who are not the same as them. This sentiment is powerfully divisive, to the apparent glee of some in the coalition government. Benefits claimants are seen as a different breed, even though "hardworking families" may also subsist on minimum wages topped up by state benefits.

Stuck a nerve - exposing how vital a documentary is

Benefits Street has quickly become a lighting rod for all perspectives on state welfare, but we have never claimed it can provide a comprehensive account of all experiences and views. Ti is an observational documentary which presents a true and fair account of life on one street. It was a deliberate decision to focus on a area where a high proportion of residents were reliant on benefits, to show the effect of benefit cuts on a community for whom they were the  principal source of income.

This series gives a voice to the disenfranchised and some of those who have been hit hardest by austerity. It was not undertaken lightly.

Benefits Street  

How does it reflect the codes and conventions of the documentary

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• Benefits Street is an example of realism documentary. This is realism because it features real people and their real lives even though people argue that they were told to exaggerate some aspects of their life. The participants of the show agree in advance to be filmed and are filmed during the events as they happen.
•  Some codes and conventions are real people; real situations, interviews with the public or participants of the documentary
• Setting the location: choose the poor street which most of them are unemployed
• Subtitle: Adding a subtitle when the English people are talking to show audience that their accent and their poor English, even though they are English. The language is quite rude in poor English.

Benefits Street (Channel 4) - a 'fly on the wall' documentary

• 'Fly-on-the-wall' documentary is named from the idea that events are seen candidly, as a fly on a wall might see them. In the purest form of fly-on-the-wall documentary-making, the camera crew works as unobtrusively as possible; however, it is also common for participants to be interviewed, often bt an off-camera voice. 
• Benefits Street successfully illustrates the appalling truth  about what happens to Britain's poorest people. They are ignored as the country grew, they are given welfare for the foreseeable future, and they live in the their drug-addled welfare ghettos.This a country's dirty little secret, which has just been exposed by a devastating Channel 4 documentary. And the Left are furious