The real life Shameless: Crime's a way of life and one girl has FIVE children by three fathers. Why are middle-class viewers hooked on Channel 4's series about a sink estate in Scunthorpe?



There’s nothing to do up here other than breed and feed,’ says Dean Bell, surveying the empty steel factory where he used to work.

While he might not have a job, the tattooed 37-year-old certainly seems to have his hands full. Dean hangs out at home — often with a beer or whisky bottle in hand — with his unemployed wife Claire, her five children by previous partners and their toddler. The couple also have another baby on the way.

Beer-bellied Dean, at one point dressed in a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan, ‘F*** moderation. Let’s get wasted’, is the unlikely star of new Channel 4 show Skint, a documentary which focuses on the residents of the Westcliff estate in Scunthorpe.

Scroll down for video



Dean and Claire Bell with their family. Dean has admitted that he would do anything, legal or illegal, for his kids

The programme, which airs at 9pm on Monday nights, has been pulling in up to four million viewers since it first hit our screens three weeks ago. Skint presents a grimly fascinating portrait of the world of ‘Welfare UK’ — a sub-section of British society blighted by broken families, crime and drug and alcohol abuse. Here, worklessness is the norm.

Not everyone is on the dole, the show’s voice-over tells us, but most are ‘between jobs’. And, it adds archly, if residents need a break from life on the estate, they can have one — at Her Majesty’s Pleasure.

Billed as the real-life version of the TV show, Shameless — in which feckless Frank Gallagher fiddles his benefits and spends all his money on drugs and alcohol — Skint is beyond depressing. Yet it makes for surprisingly compelling viewing, not least because it leads us to realise the true depth of the poverty in our midst.

This is not just a poverty of the financial variety, but a poverty of aspiration and morality that leaves the viewer feeling a queasy combination of anger and hopelessness.

If this programme does not give politicians the impetus to overhaul the benefits system, nothing will.

The location in which the documentary is set, Scunthorpe — or ‘Scunnie’ as its inhabitants like to refer to it — is, according to the sign that welcomes visitors to its borders, an ‘industrial garden town’.

But if there’s much work going on, or any flowers in bloom, the cameras have so far neglected to film them.

The Westcliff estate is the most deprived area of North Lincolnshire, with its 1,300 residents reporting levels of unemployment in the top two per cent in the country.

Unemployed Dean (left) and Claire (right) say they struggle to care for their kids on the benefits they receive



The opening episode of the documentary certainly makes you sit up and take notice when you find yourself transported inside Dean Bell’s large and unruly household. Claire is heavily pregnant and chaos ensues as children of assorted ages make an unholy din.

Dean, meanwhile, is enjoying his five minutes of fame.

‘I couldn’t give a f*** what anyone thinks. I’ll do anything for my kids, whether it’s legal or illegal,’ he announces, following a scene in which he is filmed buying from the boot of a car, chicken which has ‘fallen off the back of a lorry’.



'I'll do anything for my kids - legal or illegal.'

Dean Bell

Dean, whom, we are told, stopped working a year ago, claims the family’s £1,600-a-month benefits don’t give him enough cash to buy his food in the supermarket. He and Claire are the central focus of the documentary and personify the social mayhem which can be found on all corners of the estate.

This is a place where, quite simply, anything goes. Whether it’s drug-taking or dealing, flogging stolen goods or prostitution, the ethos here is that you do what you must to survive and get your kicks. Legality and morality are foreign concepts.

While Dean and Claire are married (the couple met when Dean was paralytically drunk, he tells us, but he realised through the haze of alcohol that they were made for one another), this certainly puts them in the minority in Westcliff — or ‘Wezzy’, as it’s known.

One of the girls featured, Katie, says only around two per cent of residents have a ‘decent’ (by which she seems to mean conventional) relationship. Another teenager remarks that some of her friends have children young because they’re ‘having a s*** time with their mums and they just want to go out and love someone’.

Typical of the residents is Hayley, who at 21 has five children by three fathers. That’s some going, even for Westcliff.

Despite the fact that Hayley has already had several partners, she’s absolutely certain that her latest boyfriend, Graham, is The One. Graham is a quiet and likeable young man: there’s no sign of him working, but, with five children to look after, maybe all hands are needed on the domestic deck.



They talk about making this relationship of theirs permanent. How will they signify it? Not with an engagement party or anything so old-fashioned, you understand. Suddenly Graham appears on screen brandishing a tattoo gun.

Here in Wezzy, love is sealed by way of His and Hers home-made tattoos. Graham takes his beloved’s hand and etches the word ‘Forever’ on her wrist. Then it’s Hayley’s turn to leave her mark on her beau. ‘Always’, she inscribes on his wrist.

Given her track record, however, it seems unlikely she will ever be celebrating her silver wedding.

Where, you are left asking, are the decent people on this sprawling estate? Has Channel 4 excluded them for not being ‘entertaining’ enough, or are there simply no decent role models here at all?

The show has been likened to Channel 4 drama Shameless, focusing on a family in a Manchester estate

The answer is that the very notion of leading by example has broken down on this estate. Anyone with the misfortune to be born here will be hard-pushed to find an escape route. For the residents of Wezzy, life begins and ends here.

No one here wears a suit, or even a pair of jeans. Tracksuits, hoodies and — wait for it — dressing gowns and pyjamas, are the uniform of choice.

No one, it seems, has a sense of purpose. The men hang around in intimidating groups, swigging extra-strong lager, and swearing at the tiny children left in their ‘care’.

When the pub’s not open, they sit on a wall in the middle of the estate, imaginatively known as ‘The Wall’. They go there, they tell us, because there’s nothing else to do round here.

‘We drink beer, we smoke weed,’ says one. Any drug you might care for from Class C to Class A is easily available locally, we are confidently informed.

The devastating effects of this drug use are everywhere. Young mother Emma used to have a drug problem, and is now resigned to taking the prescribed heroin substitute methadone for the rest of her life.

Her boyfriend Pete, meanwhile, the estate window cleaner, is a heavy drinker who is not allowed to look after the couple’s young son, Ty, after an incident where he was drunk in charge of a minor.

Even those young men on the estate without drink or drug problems struggle to motivate themselves to do anything at all.

Take 16-year-old James, Dean’s stepson, who, when he landed an interview at the Army recruitment centre, didn’t even bother to turn up.



Katie and Graham tattoo each other as a declaration of their love

When you see his own mother telling him he won’t stand a chance of getting in and his stepfather calling him a ‘f***ing retard’, it’s not hard to see where his crushing lack of self-esteem comes from.

Then there’s another lad, 15-year-old Connor (no relation to Dean), who has been excluded from seven schools, and now hasn’t been to school for four months.

Shockingly foul-mouthed and with a vile temper, he is full of dreadful pronouncements, perhaps most memorably that when he ends up in jail (it definitely seems to be a question of when, rather than if), he isn’t going to cry. Prison, it seems, holds no fear.

Often, it is seen as a respite from the relentless misery of life on the estate. There is, for example, Tracey, a professional shoplifter who acts as an unconventional Avon lady, touting her stolen booty around her fellow residents: today the swag she’s selling includes Lynx deodorant and batteries.

Shamelessly, she admits she’s not even a very good shoplifter: on the nearby High Street she points out the shops she’s been caught in and banned from, including Boots and The Body Shop, and bemoans the fact that her options are increasingly limited.



Swigging lager, men swear at children



So limited, in fact, that to feed her drug habit she’s now in another line of work: prostitution.

As she gets ready for a night on the street, she explains: ‘I have to wear a belt otherwise they try and go down your trousers when they haven’t paid to go that far’.

Unblinking, she tells the camera her terms of business: she’ll perform oral sex for £15-£20, and if someone only offers her a tenner she’ll slam the car door in their face. ‘Some of the lasses do everything for a tenner,’ she says disapprovingly — not that you get the idea that there’s much she disapproves of otherwise.

Evidence of anti-social behaviour is everywhere on the estate — from the graffiti scrawled over every available surface to elderly residents whose windows have been smashed. Crime levels are in the top one per cent in the country, with 75 separate incidents reported within a half-mile radius in March this year alone.

Communities need their support systems: and what’s painfully clear from Skint is that estates like Westcliff have pathetically few structures to support them.



Out of work: Dean Bell said he used to work in a steel factory which is now closed (stock image)

All the traditional networks — the church, a community centre, a youth club, even a cafe — seem to be absent.

Even school, the structure that should be there even when all else has failed, seems to be unable to provide a base for Westcliff: many children have eschewed education completely, and now spend their days under their duvets.

What’s flourished in the absence of such vital societal cornerstones are interventions by social services (known here as the Baby Snatchers) and relationships which often last no longer than a drunken encounter in an alleyway.

What’s most shocking about the programme, of course, is that we aren’t watching a documentary on some faraway third world country, but on a community in the heart of England.

This is an England few of us have visited and even fewer would want to: it’s in our midst, but entirely hidden from view. Worse, it has been left to fester like an unseen cancer for decades.

Now, it seems, the failure of successive governments to deal with a sector of society allowed to ‘breed and feed’ without any moral guidance, is coming home to roost.

In the past few months alone, we have been forced to wake up to this world where welfare- dependent, moral-free men have committed some of the worst crimes imaginable.

One unsettling question is whether programmes such as Skint say as much about the middle classes who sneer at Wezzy’s inhabitants as they do about the inhabitants themselves. The programme is so voyeuristic it could almost be classed as pornography, but instead of objectified sex at its centre, there’s objectified poverty.

Still, I firmly believe Skint should be required viewing for everyone in Britain. Because this is a side of our country that we don’t usually see, and its existence affects us all.



Social workers are known as baby snatchers



There’s a kind of exploitation in a society that first turns its back on a place like Westcliff, and then returns for no other reason than to document its habitat, rather like a natural history programme or a trip to the zoo.

In every individual we meet there’s at least a glimmer of something better, something that could, in more advantageous circumstances, be built on.

Little nods to human decency that — however crude or self-serving they might be — hint at an awareness of higher values.

Dean says that though he’s a drinker, it’s his only vice — and he never does drink, he insists, unless the children have eaten and are generally taken care of.

Connor’s mum tries as much as she can to get her son to school: she shouts at him, she cajoles him, she even at one point tries to shove him into a car.

And Hayley and Graham, who actually get married post-tattoos, really do seem to love one another and want their relationship to last.

But let’s not be dewy-eyed. Self-respect and responsibility are in short supply here.

Dean doesn’t have to buy stolen goods, Connor doesn’t have to play permanent truant, and Hayley might have chosen to have just one or two children, rather than five.

The saddest scene in Skint is the one that ought to be the most hopeful: the arrival of Hunter Dean Bell, Claire’s new baby, home from the hospital.

It’s soon after midnight and the clan is assembled in Dean’s kitchen: he, the proud dad, is cuddling his newest offspring and biting back the tears.

There’s no human community on earth where the arrival of a beautiful newborn baby doesn’t provide the unspoken link between past and future, where it doesn’t demand an appraisal of who we are, what we are, and where we’re going.

Like every couple who have ever had a baby, Dean and Claire want their child to have something to live for, something to grow up for, something to be proud of.

But you can’t help thinking, as you see his rosy face peeping out from Dean’s ample arms: ‘What chance has this little boy got?’

And how, in Britain in 2013, have we managed to provide such a bleak outlook for someone so precious?