Benefits Street – poverty porn, or just the latest target for pent-up British fury?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/12/benefits-street-poverty-porn-british-fury

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This year at the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas, manufacturers showed off the latest in TV technology: slightly curved screens. All TV screens were slightly curved before 1998, incidentally, but back then they were convex. Then we discovered flat screens. Now we're told concave curves are the way forward. That's progress. This time next year it'll be TVs that spread straight from the fridge. Get ready.

You don't need a curved TV, ever. The latest flat models are astounding enough. They've got built-in Wi-Fi, and Netflix, and YouTube, and a button that lets you stare at poor people. Seriously, all you have to do is hit the "4" button on Monday night and bingo: Benefits Street. I think it's in HD too.

Benefits Street has caused a row with several distinct yet interwoven strands. Some on the left think it's an offensive and misleading example of "poverty porn", which is just like regular porn, minus the money shots. Some on the right believe it's a damning indictment of the welfare state. And some people, brimming with unfocused rage, see it as a televised "scum zoo" full of pariahs for them to fling peanuts and hashtags at.

In order to function without exploding, to keep the Bake Off running and the trains delayed, to keep the populace tutting and sighing and drinking, experiencing a constant level of personal dissatisfaction with something and everything that never quite boils over into scenery-smashing, Hulk-like rage – to stop us from killing each other, in other words – British society seems to require a regularly-updated register of sanctioned hate figures, about whom it's OK to say more or less anything; people who form a vital pressure valve for this terrifying pent-up societal wrath, lurking beneath the surface like magma under Yellowstone.

The current list includes paedos, MPs, immigrants, bankers, people on benefits and reality stars. Some of the Benefits Street cast falls into the final two categories simultaneously, which means hatred squared. On top of that, their address is repeatedly broadcast on television, printed in newspapers, and shared online: you can trundle up and down using Google Streetview, glaring judgmentally at each individual pixel of their houses. I'd imagine they're having zero fun right about now. So let's calm down.

Having caught up with a recording of the first episode, quickly followed by a rough cut preview of the second, I'm a bit confused by the outrage, possibly because I saw two helpings back-to-back. The first episode was the most obviously eye-catching, largely on account of unrepentant petty criminal Danny who seemed to be playing up for the cameras. He showed viewers at home how to stop security alarms going off by lining a bag with foil before filling it with stolen gear. And it seemed to work. Channel 4 might get bollocked for that, because it's "imitable behaviour". Although if you think that's bad, ITV2 recently broadcast Ocean's Eleven, which reveals precisely how to rob a casino in step-by-step detail.

The show generated many furious tweets, but then so does everything. Right now, someone somewhere is flinging a death threat at the animated squirrel in the Alpro Almond Milk commercial. I don't buy the argument that hashtags containing the title were deliberately put onscreen at incendiary moments in the show – they flashed up before every ad break, which is what hashtags have done on half the shows on commercial television for the past year. People are seeing what they want to see.

Of course Benefits Street distorts reality. Unlike reality, it opens with a theme tune, which is followed by a litany of embellishments, omissions and ad breaks, before being brought to a halt with some scrolling credits. But on the whole, the show seems broadly sympathetic to the people it features, particularly in episode two, which depicts a house full of luckless Romanians apparently lured to the UK under false pretences and conned out of what meagre wages they'd been promised. On hearing they have nothing to eat, an Asian neighbour cooks them a free meal. After he leaves, one of them sheepishly admits that although he's a nice guy, they don't like his food because it's far spicier than they're used to. It's a funny, bittersweet moment in a largely depressing hour.

I didn't hate anyone in it. I liked them. A lot of what they had to put up with looked absolutely awful, but there also seemed to be far more authentic community spirit than I've seen on TV since Postman Pat's Magic Christmas. How you could come away feeling anything other than affection for most of the people involved is beyond me.

The problem is that title: BENEFITS STREET. When you write for newspapers, you rarely choose your own headlines. Someone else does that, and it's their job to compose the most provocative headline possible, especially these days, when anything that isn't yelpy clickbait might as well be etched on the underside of a sunken barge. That headline is the only thing half the readers seem to absorb. And sometimes titles establish an unhelpful caricature, "Benefits Street" being a case in point: an ill-advised "noisy" name making all the red ants and black ants fight to the death.

"Benefits Street" is a title cynically chosen to push buttons, and that ploy has worked. It hangs over the show like a fart at the start of a folk song, changing the tone of all that follows, stinking out the EPG and clouding human minds. Open the window. Let some fresh air in. Then maybe we can watch it properly.

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