The Great British Benefits Handout, Channel 5 - TV review: We can't control what people spend their money on

Couldn't the show's researchers have found families who wanted to put £26,000 into a help-to-buy ISA and find a stable job?

Channel 5's The Great British Benefits Handout

From West Yorkshire to Merseyside and Hull, where three families reliant on benefits were given a lump sum of £26,000 in Channel 5's The Great British Benefits Handout. The controversial TV experiment has already hit the headlines as the latest example of “poverty porn”, but refreshingly none of the contestants were portrayed as good-for-nothing scroungers. Their lives were sad, their living conditions degrading and they all lived hand to mouth. None of them wanted to be on benefits.

But introduce a lump sum of £26,000 – the maximum amount benefit claimants can receive annually – into these families' lives and you could almost hear people shouting at the television. Scott, who gave up work to look after his son with learning disabilities, bought a racoon and a bouncy castle for his party business. Long-term betrothed Tony and Diane planned to open a second-hand furniture shop. They have no prior business experience, but it's OK because Tony has been watching Cash in the Attic for the past 10 years.

Couldn't the show's researchers have found families who wanted to put £26,000 into a help-to-buy ISA and find a stable job? I suppose it wouldn't make for such good TV. And as Prof Guy Standing – one of the show's expert panellists – said, the whole point of the experiment is to remind us we can't control what people spend their money on. I just hope Tony can prove the haters wrong and make a go of his business.