Cathy Come Home

Broadcast by the BBC on 16 November 1966 as part of The Wednesday Play, Cathy Come Home was an early collaboration between director Ken Loach, producer Tony Garnett and writer Jeremy Sandford, the partnership that would define British social-realist television. Loach was not yet thirty, and the techniques he worked out here, shooting on 16mm film on real streets rather than in the studio, became the grammar of his entire career.

Sandford's screenplay, drawn from his own reporting on homelessness, follows Cathy (Carol White) and Reg (Ray Brooks), a young couple whose early happiness wears away as an accident, unemployment and unaffordable rent push them out of one precarious home after another. Loach blends scripted scenes with documentary-style voiceover and statistics, so that fiction and reportage become almost impossible to tell apart. White's open-faced, unguarded performance anchors a film that never lets the audience retreat into the comfort of watching actors.

The broadcast reached roughly twelve million viewers, a quarter of the British population, and its impact was immediate and concrete: it forced housing onto the parliamentary agenda and helped bring about the founding of the charity Shelter. Polls have repeatedly named it among the greatest British television ever made. Anyone who wants to argue that drama can change the world it depicts still reaches for it first, and very few single works of television have marked a country's conscience so deeply.