ROBERT HARDMAN: Ten years on from one of the most successful British social documentaries of recent times, things would appear to be very much the same on a terraced street.
Even though it was bin collection day earlier this morning, there are still scattered heaps of filth littering the kerb.
So far, so very Benefits Street. Ten years on from one of the most successful British social documentaries of recent times, things would appear to be very much the same on a terraced street once painted as the armpit of inner-city Birmingham.Robert Hardman and Marcela Asan, 32, who is sweeping up the litter left on the pavement outside her front door, as she does each morning
It was in January 2014 that characters such as 'White Dee', the warm-hearted 'auntie of the street', 'Black Dee', later jailed for drug and firearms offences, and Fungi, an endearingly hopeless addict, became unwitting national celebrities. The film company behind it, Love Productions, was already enjoying stellar success on the BBC with The Great British Bake Off. Now it had another hit on Channel 4.
And a few things stand out. First, most residents are in work. Second, everyone who featured in the programme has long gone. Third, no one brings up politics. Not once. The most common complaint round here, though, is the rubbish. Everyone has something to say about that, especially as the city's near-bankrupt Labour council is about to reduce collections even further.
READ MORE: Benefits Street star White Dee reveals knifeman broke into her home and threatened her in her bedroom - as she says she wishes she never appeared in hit Channel 4 show Steve sold his house to a landlord who has since converted it into multi-occupancy bedsit accommodation. I find one woman there who does not want to talk and an Eritrean man who has only been there three days and doesn't speak English.
Life in James Turner Street, she says, is good and nothing like the depiction in Benefits Street. 'Most people have a car and you can't run one of those on benefits,' she says.Ali Hussein, who works on the railways, and his wife, Samira, have lived here for eight years and like it very much. He concedes that the programme did him one favour of sorts when he arrived — a rent reduction 'because no wanted to live on Benefits Street'.'We took it over at the start of January 2014 and it was in a real mess,' says the Rev Steve Chalke, founder of the Oasis group of 54 academies. 'And the first episode of Benefits Street came out just six days later.'
Over time, the Oftsed rating kept rising. The latest salutes 'this wonderful school' as simply 'outstanding'.Finally, I track down Deirdre Kelly, aka White Dee, on the telephone. Of all the characters in Benefits Street, the mother-of-two, now 52, was the stand-out star in 2014. She went on to appear in Celebrity Big Brother later that year, by which time the public attention meant that she no longer felt safe in her old home.
'We did a great deal of research. We wanted to look at Birmingham because it was so often overlooked,' Kieran Smith, executive producer, tells me. 'It was a proper observational documentary at a time when benefits were being cut.'
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