Derry Girls creator Lisa McGee and film-maker Peter Mullan oversee these vivid 15-minute monologues about being poor. The uniformly strong tales they tell are too rarely seen in drama
Tara is a waitress supporting her widowed mother, alcoholic sister and adored niece with her nugatory wages. Jambo is a 37-year-old man with “mental health” having a birthday pint in the pub and trying to fathom his impoverished life. Hannah is part of a hardworking couple whose zero-hours contract and toddler militate against them finding new accommodation when they are summarily evicted from their one-room home. Gary is the leaseholder of a stall in a market about to be redeveloped who is plunged back into the memories of the slum clearance that broke his mother and his childhood.
They form the first four stories in Skint (BBC Four), a series of seven 15-minute monologues (four broadcast this week, three next), overseen by Lisa McGee (the creator and writer of Derry Girls) and the award-winning actor and film-maker Peter Mullan. It follows in the footsteps of the acclaimed CripTales, Soon Gone: A Windrush Chronicle and Snatches: Moments from Women’s Lives, which used the same form to break down weighty issues (disability, institutionalised racism and endemic sexism, respectively) into individual aspects and examine them in the round.
