Liz Nicholls tackles telly's Big Benefits Row

Have you joined the debate yet? Everyone’s got something to say about benefits, whether they know anything about the welfare state at all.

In fact, when gob-on-a-stick Katie Hopkins is invited to be part of a panel of experts, you know only one thing is on the telly producers' minds: shouting.

Big Benefits Row on Channel Five (Monday and on Catch-up) did exactly what it said on the tin. Matthew Wright, fresh from blubbering in the jungle, presided over this bunfight, complete with tabloid-style factoids to analyse the £166b (half of which goes to pensioners such as Peter Stringfellow, also in the audience). There was even a tacky digital counter, numbers racing up in the hundreds to demonstrate how much money was being pumped out in benefits ‘by the second’. Exciting? No. Pointless? Yes.

This ‘debate show’ is an example of telly cannibalisation at its most flagrant as Channel Five tried to piggyback the ongoing hoohah sparked by Channel Four’s Benefits Street (Fridays, 9pm). Based in James Turner Street, Birmingham, the docudrama (think My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding) focuses on the road (well, the most entertaining inhabitants of four houses) where 95 per cent of the population ‘are on benefits’. (Well, except the houseful of Romanian men who, far from expecting hand-outs, landed in Britain to work 17-hour days before being dismayed to find their gangmaster has diddled them out of their earnings and they were forced to live 13 to a house on starvation wages with one phone call to their families a month. So they shoved off.)

Benefits Street has been labeled poverty porn but it does the one thing that no one else seems interested in: giving voice to those on the dole. They might not be a representative bunch, but this is TELLY, so you get the more extreme characters thrust at you and, so long as you aren’t stupid enough to be enraged at everything put in front of you, it’s entertaining and heartwarming. Fungi (Fun-guy) is a case in point – a shell of a man who lived on the streets for 10 years, got hooked on heroin and whose life has been a carousel between prison and the social. Life seems to have beaten the stuffing out of Fungi, and you’d need a heart of stone not to laugh as he ambles about the street with cans of Special Brew and joints on the go, talking about the first crime that landed him inside (a bungled armed robbery at McDonald’s). No, his life should not be reduced to entertainment, but neither should he be pitied. He is an adult with three kids he hopes to reconnect with and seems to have a good heart.

Star of the show is White Dee, the matriarch of the street with a smoker’s voice, who seems to have enraged all and sundry by simply existing. Suffering depression (though we don’t see much, which annoys some viewers) she spends her time helping her neighbours with the daily grind of their lives (feeding people’s kids, filling out forms). The most inspiring thing about Dee and Fungi (and possibly the most enraging, depending on your outlook) is that they have a sense of humour. Yes: for all the hand-wringing and trolling these people have sparked (they have been sent death threats and abuse online) they should not be the target of hatred. If anything, their two-fingered salute at the world and desire to help each other out is the most cheering thing in this sorry debate.

Meanwhile, back in the Channel Five studio, there’s Dee, shiny-haired and sounding like the most sensible person in the room, as Hopkins spouts poison and Edwina Currie rattles food and poverty blogger Jack Munroe. “Well, I hope you’ve learned something tonight” says Matthew Wright, trying to disguise his glee at the inevitable furore that’s kicked off. Ummm, just that people rarely listen to anything anyone else has to say. Up yours, Channel Five!