Why Poverty?

A series of films which ask what it means to live in poverty in the 21st Century.

Steenrijk Straatarm

Famous, Rich And In The Slums with Comic Relief

Lenny Henry, Samantha Womack, Reggie Yates and Angela Rippon experience unimaginable poverty as they spend a week living it for real in this ground-breaking, two-part documentary for Comic Relief.

Live Aid at 40: When Rock ’n’ Roll Took on the World

A look at the legacy of Band Aid, Live Aid and Live 8 in reshaping global charity and politics. Featuring interviews with Bob Geldof, Bono, Sting, and African and western leaders of the time.

Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy

The people, ideas, and events that created our current world economy.

Naufragés des villes

Famous, Rich and Hungry

Four famous volunteers try to untangle the complicated reasons and life choices that lie behind Britain's hidden hunger crisis and are challenged to help UK households find a way out of food poverty

America's War on Poverty

In the midst of unprecedented national prosperity in the 1960s, poverty was "rediscovered" by American policy makers, media and the public. This series examines how the poor fared during these years and the resultant evolution of foundation and public sector programs addressing the challenges of poverty.

Fin de mois

Boys from the Blackstuff

Alan Bleasdale's five-part series relates the further experiences of unemployed Liverpudlian tarmac layers Dixie, Chrissie, Loggo and Yosser, and their revered older friend, retired longshoreman and union leader, George Malone. As they struggle to make ends meet in a depressed economy, and to hold together their financially battered families, they are harrassed by the petty bureaucrats of the DHSS. But the lumbering investigational juggernaut is, both comically and tragically, guided by drivers with only a provisional license.

Top Boy

Two seasoned drug dealers return to the gritty street of London, but their pursuit of money and power is threatened by a young and ruthless hustler.

The Job Lot

The daily troubles of the people who work in a busy West Midlands Job Centre, and the people who don’t work there, or anywhere else for that matter.

Young, Gifted And Broke

That Mountain That Sea

The Oblongs

The Oblongs are not so much dysfunctional as slightly nonfunctional. Living next to a polluted swamp has left them with the occasional missing limb or mysterious growth, but through it all, this close-knit family sticks together.Sometimes literally.

Trepalium

The economic situation is a nightmare: only 20% of the population is employed. The Actives live inside the city. On the fringes, in the Zone, live the Jobless. Separating them is a wall.

Auf Wiedersehen, Pet

Seven British construction workers escape Britain's ever growing dole queues and travel to Germany to work on a site in Dusseldorf. We follow their trials and tribulations of working away from home and away from the women they left behind.

Bleak House

Bleak House is BBC television drama first broadcast in 1985. The serial was adapted by Arthur Hopcraft from Charles Dickens' novel Bleak House and it was the second adaptation by the BBC.

Last of the Summer Wine

Unencumbered by wives, jobs or any other responsibilities, three senior citizens who've never really grown up explore their world in the Yorkshire Dales. They spend their days speculating about their fellow townsfolk and thinking up adventures not usually favored by the elderly. Last of the Summer Wine premiered as an episode of Comedy Playhouse in 1973. The show ran for 295 episodes until 2010. It is the longest running comedy Britain has produced and the longest running sitcom in the world.

Surya

The show follows the story of Surya, a middle-class youngster struggling to find a decent job but to his misfortune, he never achieves any success at the task.