Skint review: These well-meaning monologues about life under the Tories slightly miss the mark

‘Derry Girls’ star Saoirse-Monica Jackson plays a broke waitress in the best of these 15-minute dramas

Saoirse-Monica Jackson as Tara in ‘Skint’ (BBC/Hopscotch Films/Tommy Ga-Ken Wan)

If you need a bit of respite from war, Covid and hyperinflation then may I just gently steer you away from the BBC’s Skint? The first quartet (of six) 15-minute monologues feel very much as though a commissioning editor has given four rather earnest writers each the task of dramatising key passages about life under this wicked Tory government from a Jeremy Corbyn speech – homelessness, the mental health crisis, the social care crisis, the horrors of gentrification, zero hours contracts and more. The general effect is to confirm what you already know or fear about the plight of the poor; but also that there is absolutely sod all that you, or indeed a television screenwriter, can do about it.

Of the four, the one about a waitress driven mad by class-based hatred is by far the most compelling, precisely because it takes us away from real-life squalor and deftly lands us in something like a scene from a Saw movie. Aptly titled “I’d Like to Speak to the Manager” and written by Lisa McGee, it features Saoirse-Monica Jackson as Tara, a hard-working, poorly paid waitress who finds herself unbearably patronised by some drunk, entitled, filthy rich diner who has inherited far more money than Tara and her entire family would earn in a lifetime. The snobby woman humiliates Tara by summoning her manager to complain about getting the order for the starters wrong (though Tara did no such thing). So Tara follows her home, ties her up and tells her, and us, exactly what’s wrong with the established social order.

You instantly recognise Jackson from Derry Girls, and there’s really no one in the business who does intense, indignant nuttiness quite like she does. The only thing wrong with her rant about life’s unfairness is that it ends not with the literal evisceration of a particularly unpleasant product of the class system, but with the ultimate cop-out – as Tara turns to the camera and declares: “Next time I might.” So it was all a fantasy. It’s a bit anticlimactic, that, as if Lenin, or Corbyn for that matter, had decided on second thoughts he can’t be bothered with tearing down the capitalist system after all.

The other monologists are also engaging, but have to work hard when the scripting doesn’t quite add up, and they occasionally look like they’re slogging through a claim for universal credit. In “Hannah”, by Kerry Hudson, Emma Fryer makes a fine job of playing a homeless mum wandering around Great Yarmouth trying to find a bed for the night. We’re invited to believe that she had been chucked out of her hostel because she threw a tantrum after the greedy landlady ate an entire red velvet cake she’d made for her baby’s birthday. Besides, the camera ends up being quite kind to Yarmouth beach, which is maybe not the desired effect.

Michael Socha is as convincing as he can be in “No Grasses, No Nonces”, written by Byron Vincent. He plays Jambo, a man in early middle age recalling the experience of adolescent sexual molestation and drug abuse while getting blind drunk in the worst pub in Derby. Fine, but his intoxication, anger and mental confusion actually means we can’t quite understand what happened and is happening to him.

The fourth monologue, which is the most bewildering, concerns mushrooms, leaseholder rights and property developers, and actually uses time-lapse footage of fungi to make some point about urban redevelopment schemes. Gabriel Gbadamosi’s well-meaning tale is undermined by Gary Beadle playing the part of a market trader threatened by eviction, who behaves like he’s actually done quite nicely for himself and is well aware of the value of his lease contract. With his bowls of lovely, fresh, exotic mushrooms, he hardly looks skint; more like he might appear as a successful small businessman in the next Conservative manifesto, giving the thumbs up next to Boris Johnson smiling inanely in a white grocer’s coat. Confusing on every level, that one.

The monologues mostly make the case that even if you work hard, stick to the script, follow directions, and apply yourself to the task in hand, the system still makes your life difficult. Sadly, in Skint, it seems as though that applies to some of our best television actors just as much as the rest of us.