If you do the kind of political journalism that involves talking to the general public, something faintly magical can sometimes happen. As events swirl around and you try to make sense of huge, complicated themes, a single conversation will bring everything into focus. And not via words alone: facial expressions, gestures, and the way individual words are emphasised can give you a vivid sense of how people think, and the way their feelings could create political change. The encounter might be fleeting, but a connection can be made; as one side understands, the other feels heard.

Since 2010, we have been responsible for the Guardian video series Anywhere But Westminster, in which we try to explore the gap between high politics and life as it is lived. With so much political coverage now based on opinion polling, we are interested not just in how people might vote, but what is behind their political choices. Vox pops have long been a crucial part of what we do.

In the summer of 2014, our travels brought us to the town of Clacton-on-Sea in Essex. The local Conservative MP, Douglas Carswell, had resigned from his party and joined Ukip, then led by Nigel Farage. For us, the resulting byelection was a reason to visit the neighbourhood of Jaywick, which government statistics showed was the poorest place in England. It was here that we first got a sense of something potentially seismic. At that point, Ukip were largely understood as a new presence on the political right, who were appealing to habitual Tory voters. But things were shifting.

When we arrive in a new place, the drill goes something like this. Find a location: a high street, or shopping parade; maybe a residential street, or the entrance to a railway station. Acknowledge the awkward nature of what you are about to do, but get over your nerves, and grit your teeth. Survey the people you can see. Then find your first potential interviewee, switch the camera on, and begin: “Excuse me. We’re making a film. Do you mind if we talk to you for a bit?”

In Jaywick, sitting on a bench on a raised step outside his house, was a retired man who had once been a railway worker in east London, and a member of Aslef, the train drivers’ union. We shared his company for a quarter of an hour. Just about everything he said highlighted the unexpected turns politics was suddenly taking, and we have returned to the footage we shot time and again. Sometimes, we don’t ask for people’s names (it can make people feel a bit like they’re being interrogated), so we have always referred to him as “Step Man”. Our exchange began when we showed him one of Carswell’s campaign leaflets.

John Harris: “So you’ve had one of these through your door?”

Step Man: “Yeah.”

JH: “What do you think of him, and the fact that he’s left the Conservative party?”

SM: “Good for him. It’s about time somebody got up and spoke.”

JH: “Right now, what’s wrong with Britain?”

SM: “Well, nobody’s doing anything are they? It’s all going around in circles. They do bugger all.”

JH: “Have they done anything for Jaywick lately?”

SM: “Nothing gets done for bloody Jaywick.”

JH: “What needs doing?”

SM: “Everything. Look at the roads. Look at the state of it. The alleyways, look. Look at it all. We’re a backwater, aren’t we? That nobody gives a shit about.”

JH: “And do you think [Carswell], and Mr Farage, are any different?”

SM: “I’m hoping so.”

JH: “Who did you used to vote for in the past?”

SM [Emphatically, before the end of the question]: “Labour. Always voted Labour.”

JH: “And what changed?”

SM: “Well, bloody Blair. Let’s face it, he did sod all for this country … And now he’s in Europe, pissing about there, making millions. He went more Conservative than the Conservatives.”

JH: “But this fellow [Carswell], until a week ago, was in the Conservative party himself. And now you’re going to vote for him!”

SM: “Well, yeah. But he wants to make a few changes.”

JH: “Do you think he’ll help Jaywick?”

SM: “I bloody hope so.”

JH: “Time was, Labour was the party of the working man, eh?”

SM: “Course it was. Course it was.”

JH: “What happened?”

SM: “Bloody Thatcher got in – destroyed it, didn’t she? Done the working classes, didn’t she? Pissed the miners off. Done the railways. She pissed us all off, big time.”

JH: “But Ukip’s full of people who think Mrs Thatcher was the bee’s knees.”

SM: “Nah … ”

JH: “They are! They’re all Thatcherite… [Carswell] wants to shrink the state. He’s no fan of the trade unions and the working man.”

SM: “I don’t suppose he is. Nobody is, are they?”

JH: “But somebody with your politics shouldn’t be voting for him.”

SM: [Defiantly] “Yeah, course they should.”

Vox pops have a long history. A US radio series of that name began in 1932, sampling people’s opinions about the presidential election that would bring Franklin Roosevelt to power. In 1961, an influential French documentary titled Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer) based a whole film around asking people on the street a simple but provocative question: “Are you happy?” Vox pops were popularised on British TV by the trailblazing presenter Alan Whicker (“I went out with my cameras into the monstrous avenues of Houston, stopped passersby and asked whether they owned a gun – I discovered it wasn’t a question of yes or no, but how many,” he once said). By the time we started doing them, they were an established part of TV news packages – the bit that usually comes near the end to show some “extra views of the subject matter in hand”, to quote one set of BBC guidelines.

But Step Man represented something different. In the footage of our conversation, interviewer and interviewee are sitting at the same level, instead of a TV crew being ranged in formation against their quarry. The interview turns into an exchange between equals, and by the end, the power structure is reversed. In effect, Step Man told us not only that the old political certainties are dying, but also that a different kind of political journalism is called for. Reporters needed to go to places outside the traditional centres of power. The story must be dictated, not by a script they bring with them, but by what they find when they get there.

The initial spark for Anywhere But Westminster was the headache-inducing tedium of covering party conferences. The first time we worked together, in the autumn of 2009, we walked out of Labour’s annual gathering in Brighton and asked members of the public what they thought of the party’s sudden fixation with a group of voters termed “the squeezed middle”. In response, people talked about their exasperation with such phrases (“I’m working-class,” said one man, “why’s it always about the middle?”), and their overwhelming sense of distance from an event that was happening only a few minutes away.

With the arrival of the coalition government in 2010, we believed there was a damaging estrangement between politics and the public. We decided to put this alienation at the centre of our work, and started travelling around the country, talking to ordinary people in places that were rarely visited by journalists, TV news crews or political reporters. The after-effects of the financial crash of 2008 had yet to make an impact on British politics, and the UK seemed locked into certainties that had prevailed since the 1990s. Viewed from on high, a lot of voters seemed either uninterested in politics or sufficiently becalmed that they would behave mostly as the main parties expected.

But out in the country, dissent and resentment were bubbling away, and through the prism of vox pops, we were starting to understand what was happening. We talked to people who had strong opinions, but were often not the kind of voters who had either the time or inclination to make their voices heard via the traditional forums: party activism, public meetings, protest marches. As journalists employed by the Guardian, we needed to be fair and balanced, but not necessarily impartial. We were trying to expose our viewers to opinions they were probably not used to hearing. Our own views came into the conversations we had, and made these exchanges more equal, authentic and spontaneous.

John Domokos filming in Merthyr Tydfil in 2016

The people we met during this initial period have been stuck in our heads for years. From 2011: the two young men selling paintball sessions in central Birmingham – one of them just back from military duty in Afghanistan – who were lucky to even make the minimum wage, and completely detached from politics. In 2013: the two older men in Merthyr Tydfil who answered our questions about the death of Margaret Thatcher by telling us they still thought about the 1980s miners’ strike “every day”, and a 17-year-old student who did not know what a trade union was. In 2014 we met Debbie, a young mum from a council estate in Falkirk, Scotland. At a packed pro-independence public meeting on a Sunday night, she told us that the referendum had ignited her interest in politics for the first time. It had been, she said, “One of the most exciting things that’s ever happened.”

Standard TV news packages tend to be scripted by the reporter, and vox pops are added to show what the public think of the story that’s just been told. For us, although we always pre-arranged some encounters, vox pops were the first thing we did when we hit town. The views we encountered then guided a lot of what we did. We asked the people we met where we should go next, or who else we should meet. If a conversation with someone was particularly interesting, we would take their number, with a view to meeting them again.

The films we were making were shaped by what we divined from talking to people, rather than the other way round. When we spoke to people for any length of time, our questions tended not to begin with “Who are you going to vote for?” or “What do you think about Brexit?”, but much more open, contextual lines of enquiry: “What’s it like living here?” or “How do you feel about the future?” We did not wear suits, or carry off-puttingly cumbersome equipment, or shine lights in people’s faces. If the interviewee had the time, the conversation often lasted for 10 or 15 minutes.

As we spoke to people, we sensed that the gap between politics, the media and the public was widening. It was also becoming unsustainable. “They’re all in it for themselves, they don’t care about us” may have become the great cliche of vox pop journalism. But before it was a cliche, it was a warning.

From the early 1990s until around 2010, mainstream debate was personified by such politicians as Tony Blair and Bill Clinton: men with an alleged genius for understanding public sentiment, and manipulating it. But since then, politics has been upended. Within a couple of years of David Cameron taking power, an often angry and unpredictable public was starting to render the usual rituals – big speeches, appearances on daytime TV – increasingly useless. Now, three years after Cameron left the stage, voters increasingly set the agenda. Not surprisingly, the vox pop – the literal “voice of the people” – has itself become the focus of angry debate.

Last month, an Ofcom review found that many viewers thought the use of vox pops in the BBC’s news and current affairs coverage gave more prominence to extreme views at the expense of the “middle ground”. On Twitter you will find hundreds of tweets expressing exasperation with the form. There is a certain irony in people who habitually sound off online taking issue with other people voicing their opinions, but that doesn’t seem to stem the torrent: “I’m fed up of seeing vox pops of closet racist Dave from Blackpool and closet xenophobe Tony from Skegness.” “Ban all vox pops on the news. I really don’t care what Pete the electrician from Stoke-on-Trent thinks about constitutional law.” “Another day, another set of BBC vox pops from a load of pensioners at a ballroom dance.”

In March this year, as Theresa May’s Brexit deal collided with parliament, the writer and comedian David Baddiel expressed his dismay on Twitter: “BBC News are once again doing that thing: ‘We sent our reporter to … a Leave constituency, always. Because that’s where people will be crossest. Which they think makes for better vox pops.”

Back in 2017, The Radio Times published a piece by the columnist Alison Graham: “If I were Queen of the world I would draw up an Act of Parliament on fancy notepaper banning television vox pops from the minute an election is called until the result is declared. Then I’d give myself emergency powers to ban them for an unspecified period after that, too. Then I’d hope that in a world where, thanks to social media, no opinion ever goes unexpressed in a torrent of online detritus, vox pops will surely, finally, be dead.”

John Harris interviewing a homeless woman in Dover in 2018. Photograph: John Domokos/The Guardian

These furies seem of a piece with the regular explosions of annoyance about audience members on BBC1’s Question Time, and viral mockery of the contradictory opinions of participants in radio phone-ins. Hostility to vox pops arises from the feeling that too much media attention is focused on a particular kind of leave supporter – white, old, working-class. It’s true that the 48.1% of voters who backed remain often seem to play only a minor role in the media’s portrayal of where Brexit sits in our politics, but there is perhaps a snobbish idea that some people are beyond the pale, and things would be a lot better if they were returned to a state of voicelessness.

But there are questions to be asked about how vox pops are used, and what they say about the media’s attitudes to so-called ordinary people. These interviews come at the end of a package – suggesting that the substance of the story has already been largely decided – and follow a basic formula: one for, one against, and one comedy reply.

The superficial presentation of people’s views in hasty vox pops is a key part of one of the biggest political stories of our time. In Britain and elsewhere, a constructed idea of “the people” is now both central to events, and deeply problematic. The new breed of populist leaders use public appeal to justify a politics of division and nastiness. The same reductive approach is common to Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, the Italian politician Matteo Salvini. Want to keep out immigrants? Build a wall. Fear for the nation’s social fabric? Classify incomers by usefulness, according to the “Australian-style points system”. This kind of politics never deals substantially with the complicated, difficult stuff woven into a lot of people’s sense of grievance – deindustrialisation, housing shortages, a world that has long since started moving into an era of automation and insecurity. In the populist worldview, “the people” are one-dimensional; so are the solutions.

On Wednesday 6 May 2015, opinion polls were still suggesting the next day’s election would be very close. In the weeks immediately beforehand, 56% of published polls had put Labour ahead. That day, we published a film put together over two days talking to people in the bellwether Midlands constituency of Nuneaton. We had been exploring the effects of five years of austerity, and a narrative had taken shape in our heads that the country might be ready for a change. But the vox pops we did in Nuneaton hit us like a blast of cold air. Our film rejected the fashionable idea of a “change moment”, and instead highlighted the tangle of resentments – against benefit claimants, immigrants, and the supposedly cushy lives of people who lived in Scotland – that seemed to be driving people’s political thinking. It wasn’t what we wanted to hear, but it was pretty much all we found.

When the Conservatives won a parliamentary majority, there was a great deal of soul-searching among the editors, reporters and commentators who had been taken by surprise. Some theories held that there had been specific problems with the pollsters’ methodologies (over-weighting particular groups of Labour voters, underestimating “shy Tories”). There was also general acknowledgement in the media that political journalism had relied too much on data, and not enough on qualitative conversations with voters.

But something else was going on. In left-leaning political circles, people wondered how they had not seen the Tory victory coming. Part of the explanation came from an effect of social media, identified by the internet activist Eli Pariser in 2011 as the “filter bubble”: an effect of endless personalisation, which, he said, “moves us very quickly toward a world in which the internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see.”

We were not aware of it at the time, but doing vox pops had become a way of bursting our bubbles. By going to locations we wouldn’t normally visit, and allowing random chance to dictate who we spoke to, we had rediscovered some kind of antidote to the data-driven approach of polling and the algorithms of social media.

But by the end of that year, it was our turn for some soul-searching. A December byelection in Oldham West and Royton was the first test for the Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn. We arrived in town buoyed by the sense that we had successfully divined the likely result of the election, and by our early coverage of the rise of Corbynism. It was raining torrentially for much that day, which makes for harder work than usual. We took cover in an indoor market, and got to work talking to people. We were shocked by the hostility towards Corbyn among older Labour voters; in our minds, the force of their opinions signified a serious possibility that the party would lose the seat.

In fact, Labour won with a majority of more than 10,000. We learned several lessons. First, predicting political outcomes was a mug’s game. Second, we had been guilty of creating our own filter bubble, by relying too much on a particular type of voter found in a particular place. Statisticians call this “availability bias”. In simple terms, you can’t base political coverage only on the sort of people you find in a market in the middle of the day.

In May 2016, the referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU was looming. Polls were tight, but the general consensus was that the remain side would win. As we began a new series of Anywhere But Westminster, we were determined not to repeat our own mistakes. We spent a week driving from Merthyr Tydfil (we like it there – people talk) to Manchester, via the English Midlands. We had nothing set up: our only aim was to speak to as wide a variety of voters in as wide a variety of places as possible.

We listened to Labour-voting leavers in Merthyr, and wealthier Eurosceptic Tory supporters in Leominster, Herefordshire. In the inner-city neighbourhood of Handsworth in Birmingham, we got a sense that assumptions of a remain victory were by no means well founded. There, we tested the received view of Brexit as a cause that only appealed to a certain kind of white person. At that point, many people were describing the respective sides of the battle as “in” and “out”. In a downpour, we spotted a British-Asian man taking shelter, wound down the car window, and asked him which side he was on. “Out,” he shot back.

In Soho Road, the multicultural thoroughfare that is Handsworth’s main drag, we talked to Sikh business owners – who, in defiance of the facts, seemed to think that people from EU countries were a drain on the state and on taxpayers, and other people whose support for Brexit seemed to be down to the decay and decline they saw in their immediate environment.

On Soho Road in Handsworth, Birmingham in 2016. Photograph: John Domokos

We then went up the M6 to Manchester. At a university recruitment fair, 10 vox pops turned up only one leave supporter. When we asked them how they felt about the future, most of the students we met were optimistic. But 15 minutes drive away, in the deprived northern Mancunian neighbourhood of Collyhurst, the polarities were reversed. “I fear for the kids – for my grandkids and that,” said one woman. “Jobs, and things like that: so I’m looking at pulling out.”

Her neighbour had come to the UK from Malawi. “I’m looking at immigration,” he said. “I studied environmental health, and I can’t even get a job. As a person that came into the UK, I’ve seen the change. I know what is happening. It’s affected me. And the thing is … I’m pulling out.”

We stopped to talk to two women next to a burned-out pub called the Billy Greens. Close by was an abandoned playing field, where rusty goalposts protruded from an expanse of overgrown grass. The conversation was brief, but it got to the heart of how the leave campaign had managed to frame its campaign as the vehicle for an unlikely kind of class war.

JH: “How is Collyhurst doing?”

Woman 1: “Collyhurst is coming up again. It’s a really nice place to live. But we do need more money spent on it.”

JH: “Have people in power talked about spending money here?”

W1: “They’ve had the gardens done, but that’s it. Nothing else. There’s nothing for the kids to do. Nothing for the kids to play on. Nothing at all. And yet it’s a lovely place to live.”

JH: “But booming, thriving Manchester’s only 10 minutes’ drive down there.”

W1: “Years ago, when I grew up here, there were places to go: playschemes, and everything. There’s nothing for kids. Nothing at all. You can look round and see.”

JH: “It’s home, though, right? You feel very connected to it.

W1: “Oh yeah. [Pointing at the pub] My mum had her wake there, God rest her soul, in the Billy Greens.”

JH: “What I find odd coming here, is that they’ve spent millions of pounds regenerating the middle of Manchester … ”

W1: “Oh yeah.”

JH: “But you haven’t had money spent here.”

Woman 2: “In Miles Platting [nearby area], they closed the swimming baths and all that lot.”

W1: “And the library. They’ve got nothing. And I feel sorry for them. For those six weeks [of school] holidays, if you haven’t got a lot of money, you’ve got nothing.”

John Domokos: “I’m curious about why you think that happens: all the money gets spent there, not here.”

Woman 1: “It’s people with money. People with money. Money talks!”

JH: “Last question. How are you voting in this referendum?”

W1 and W2, loudly and emphatically: “Out!”

JH: “They’re all voting ‘in’ in town.”

Woman 1: “Course they will! ‘Cos they’ve got that!” [rubs thumb and finger together to suggest money]

JH: “So it’s down to a very simple thing for you – those who’ve got money vote which way?”

W1: “To stay in.”

JH: “And those who haven’t got as much money?”

W1: “To come out.”

We didn’t predict the referendum result. But for us, the film that finished in Collyhurst helped to frame what had happened. Lots of analysis and data since that referendum has cast doubt on the idea that Brexit was some kind of working-class revolt. But all across Britain, in neglected places that rarely saw TV cameras, we had met people who were voting to leave the EU as a way of calling for change: to be heard. The idea of listening to the “left behind” briefly took hold, and found its way into Theresa May’s early speeches as prime minister. It felt to us like Brexit might be a turning point for Britain, and that the vox pop was somehow part of what was changing.

A year later, Theresa May called the general election of 2017. Mostly because we had never been there, we decided to begin our coverage in the Cornish town of Redruth, where the last Cornish tin mine had closed 20 years earlier. Partly because tin is a crucial component in smartphones and electric cars, there had recently been talk of reopening the mine, something that seemed to interest a lot more people than party politics. The campaign had yet to ignite: the people we spoke to seemed largely detached from it, and the few people we could persuade to talk specifics said they would be voting Conservative.

Theresa May was ahead in the polls, and there was a sense that right-leaning Brexit supporters would have things their way. But as we kicked our heels on an almost deserted, pedestrianised street, a man on a mobility scooter came into view, and clocked our camera. He would identify himself only as “the tin man”.

Tin Man: “Are you making a film about the deprivation in this country? This fascist shithole?”

JH: “Is it that bad?”

TM: “Well, don’t you think it’s that bad? Or do you not see it as it is? If you fell down dead now, mate, no one would give a shit. Isn’t that a sign of a fascist country?”

JH: “I meet a lot of people who seem quite cheered up, because they voted Brexit and we’re getting out and things are going their way.”

TM: “Yeah, brilliant. Prices are going up, and it’s costing another $30m to reopen the tin mine because of the fall in the pound. This wonderful country doesn’t manufacture anything any more. We’re totally reliant on Swedish mining equipment, which is costing us more money. It’s not helping us, mate. People have been conned.”

JH: “Do you have a meaningful option in this election, do you think?”

TM: “Absolutely. For the first time ever I think we’ve genuinely got a choice.”

JH: “And the choice is?”

TM: “To do things differently. There are countries that do things differently. I want to vote against crony capitalism. And the only way to do that is to vote for someone like Jeremy Corbyn.”

JD: “What’s it like being disabled in the current climate?”

TM: “It’s an absolutely miserable experience. Constantly picked on and harassed by the government. I got myself a cracking job down the mine: a job I was born to do. Now I get problems with my health, and I get treated like dirt. I’m running around on a scooter that was given to me [by a friend]. I don’t get any help from the government whatsoever. And this is after I put millions of pounds in the economy, working at the tin mine.”

JD: “The crux of this is … ”

TM: [loudly] “The crux of it is, surely society can be better than this!”

JH: “We met a woman down there who said she thought Jeremy Corbyn was dangerous.”

TM: “That’s just ridiculous, isn’t it? He’s a man who wants to change things for the better. Change the priority. Stop spending money on bloody war, feed and clothe the poor. Not one person excluded, yeah? And then we can start to progress as a species, for the first time ever.”

We met the Tin Man when Labour were 15 points behind in the polls. The encounter with him was cut into a short standalone video that was posted on Facebook. It quickly amassed 2.2m views, and he was the subject of a story in the Camborne and Redruth Gazette. Labour came within 1,500 votes of winning the seat.

Now another election is looming, and we are still doing vox pops. But in the course of the last three years or so, encounters between the media and the public have been so built into the Brexit moment that they have become ritualised.

In terms of the sheer amount of vitriol, mistrust, mocking memes and conspiracy-mongering, we are arguably in the middle of Britain’s first true social-media election. In some ways, Twitter is one giant vox pop. But there are crucial differences. Most people don’t have a huge Twitter following. And the things that make vox pops both revealing and satisfying are absent: all context and local surroundings, all the non-verbal communication that humans use to signal respect and empathy.

One thing seems particularly striking while going back through our archive of roughly 140 films, and probably more than 1,000 hours of footage: almost all of our encounters have ended on friendly terms. No matter what political differences come to the surface, the encounters usually proceed respectfully – that’s how people tend to behave when they come face to face.

Ten years of vox-popping has taught us that calling the results of elections is not our job. But if Anywhere But Westminster has one key purpose, it is to at least try to transcend the polarisation and mutual loathing. At the risk of sounding sentimental, we want people to listen to each other.

Two weeks ago, after we had finished filming in Southend-on-Sea, we drove the 30 miles to Jaywick, and went back to find Step Man. At the local convenience store, the woman behind the counter told us that people in Jaywick now hated the media: there had been too many programmes, she said, reducing it to a caricature of deprivation. The worst, she said, had been a Channel 5 show titled Benefits By the Sea.

It was surprisingly easy to locate his house: the same red car was parked outside, and the bench was still there, propped against the wall. But when we rang the bell, there was at least two minutes of complete silence, before an upstairs window opened. There he was: paler and more gaunt before, and half-hidden behind the pane. We spoke for 10 minutes.

SM: “Hello there.”

JH: “Hello. I don’t know whether you remember us. Five years ago, we were making a film in Jaywick. We spoke to you on that bench there.”

SM: “Oh yeah?”

JH: “Can we talk to you again?”

SM: “Not really. I’m not very well at the moment. I’ve got emphysema.”

JH: “What do you think of the state of the country?”

SM: “[Laughs] Shit.”

JH: “Do you think things are better or worse than when we met you five years ago?”

SM: “Going like that [moves arm downwards], isn’t it?”

JH: “Did you vote in the referendum?”

SM: “Of course I did. And I voted to leave.”

JH: “How do you feel about that?”

SM: “Well, I want to be out. Nobody seems to know what they’re doing.”

JH: “And how’s Jaywick doing?”

SM: “Oh, the same old same old. Nothing seems to change in Jaywick. Jaywick just rattles along. Like the rest of the country.”

JH: “Are you going to vote in the election?”

SM: “Of course I am.”

JH: “Who are you going to vote for?”

SM: “I’ve voted Labour all my life, and I’m not going to vote for Corbyn. He’s not doing the working classes any good at all.”

JH: “So if not him, who are you going to vote for?”

SM: “Boris.”

JH: “God – you’re a lifelong Labour voter, voting for Boris?”

SM: “Yeah, because I want to get out of bloody Europe.”

JH: “But what’s he going to do to the country?”

SM: “Well, I don’t know. But as long as he gets us out of the mire.”

JH: “Eton-educated, very wealthy … ”

SM: “I wish I was. But they need to get it all sorted.”

JH: “And the future of the country? How do you feel about that?”

SM: “Well, I’d love to see it blossom. The poor having a few bob in their pocket. Pensioners doing well. All looked after. Hospitals. None of this … Every time you go into hospitals, hanging about in corridors – I’ve been there many, many times. Friday and Saturday night – all these arseholes who’ve had too many shandies, cluttering it all up, and people lying on trolleys, here there and everywhere.”

JH: “And you’ve had that experience?”

SM: “Yes. Many, many times.”

JH: “When you voted for Brexit, was the NHS in your mind? The idea of bringing the money back?”

SM: “Of course it was.”

JH: “It was a dirty lie, wasn’t it?”

SM: “We don’t know yet.”

JH: “You were a railwayman and you voted Labour all your life. You know of old that if we get Conservative governments, they don’t make anything better.”

SM: “Yeah, but I can’t see Corbyn making it any better.”

JH: “The conversation we had with you was a big thing for us. It changed the way we thought about politics.”

SM: “Well … I hope we just get out [of the EU]. And do very, very well.”

It was getting colder: he was starting to cough. We said our goodbyes – “See you later, my old mate,” he said – and he closed the window and went back inside, after we’d asked him his name. He told us it was Frank.

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