This shocking drama uses the real experience of hundreds of warehouse ‘pickers’ to tell the grim story of those who enable our internet shopping habits
It may not turn you full communist by the end of its single hour, but it’s hard to imagine that new screenwriter Helen Black’s punchy fact-based drama Life and Death in the Warehouse (BBC Three) won’t help shift every viewer’s individual dial to walk to an independent shop next time they need something. It’s a grim story of the behind-the-scenes work that provides us consumers with a life of unparalleled convenience.
Our stage is set in an Amazonian warehouse. I use the adjective to mean “massive” only, you understand. Although the online retail giant Amazon has been accused of and associated with many of the practices depicted in Life and Death’s tale of abused and exploited workers, it has rejected all such claims and its name – heaven forfend! – is never mentioned here. A series of opening captions says only that the recent boom in online shopping has created an invisible army of about 1 million warehouse workers, hundreds of whose experiences at various places have been used as the basis for the drama. “Some of these companies you will know, others you won’t have heard of,” it explains. Between the captions, scenes of a woman miscarrying in a toilet cubicle play out, before we move back in time to where this emblematic catastrophe began.
