The outsider

Credit: David Levene

Dominic Savage

What has Dominic Savage got to do with housing and regeneration? On the face of it, precious little. Savage is a filmmaker, known for using improvisational techniques, and looks the unconventional part in his tropical shirt and letterbox spectacles.

Yet Savage produces dramas that go to the heart of some of the toughest issues facing our society: the lives of young offenders, in the 2002 television drama Out of Control, and racial tensions in this year’s much-lauded big-screen debut, Love + Hate.

Now the Bafta award-winning writer/director is turning his attention to homelessness, with a television drama called Born Equal. Due to be screened on BBC television, Born Equal charts the life of a young homeless mother, played by Anne-Marie Duff, who, while staying in a London bed and breakfast hostel, encounters a wealthy volunteer outreach worker, played by Colin Firth.

The choice of homelessness as subject matter is timely. Next month marks the 40th anniversary of the screening of another television drama about homelessness, Cathy Come Home. For those not old enough to remember, Cathy Come Home’s depiction of an average family’s descent into homelessness caused a furore when it was first screened, coinciding with the formation of homelessness pressure group Shelter.

Savage downplays the potential for Born Equal to have a similar impact, saying: “It is through the drama of people’s lives that we can understand what’s going on. I don’t think films like this can change things, they can just illuminate.” But he adds: “The themes of Cathy Come Home are as true today as they were then – the idea of having something and then losing it all. That is one of the things I felt most strongly about.”

The main character of Born Equal is a young mother who loses it all when she leaves an abusive marriage. To form the story for the drama, Savage visited hostels for the homeless around the country, and spoke to organisations such as The Children’s Society and Shelter. He explains: “Basically I was trying to find out what the heart of the homelessness problem is. It seemed to me the basic thing is the shortage of affordable housing, which means that there are more people waiting to be housed and in temporary accommodation. There is a lot of care and provision for people living on the streets, but the people living in temporary hostels are stuck in a limbo existence, which seems the most awful way to live. They are not visible for a start.”

Credit: David Levene

People living in temporary hostels are stuck in a limbo, a most awful way to live. They’re invisible

Savage says that in his researches he encountered many people in his central character’s plight. “There were people who had suddenly found themselves homeless for a reason. I found people living in one room with two or three kids. I found their state of mind was so demoralised that you felt they were quite helpless and hopeless.

“The process by which they would then get on the housing list is all quite muddy. All you knew was that some people were waiting two, three, four years to get a home, and then that home wouldn’t necessarily be in the area they wanted.”

Like many of Savage’s dramas, Born Equal focuses on the lives of people who find themselves outside the system. That focus comes from his Margate childhood, says Savage: “I have had this sense of being slightly outside of me all my life. So I feel the plight of people who feel that way. And I have a curiosity. I am not interested in lives that are ticking along.”

Savage, the son of a seaside organist, saw his home town as a fractured community. He says: “It didn’t have a real sense of community because it was based on people visiting, so there were two sides – the liveliness and sunshine of the summer and the depression and nothing

of the winter. It was a contrasting place. In my research for Born Equal I spoke to an asylum seeker who, when he first came to the country, had been sent to a hotel in Margate. It is one of those ironies of life that people end up in seaside hotels, which are meant as places for people to have fun in with the views of the sea and the beach.”

Savage made his escape from Margate by becoming first a child actor and then a documentary filmmaker before turning to drama. One of his early documentaries after graduating from film school in 1990 was The Outsiders, a chronicle of the life of a down and out housed in one of Eastbourne’s hotels. That film was to spark Savage’s interest in returning to the subject of homelessness.

Homelessness might provide good stories for a drama, but the filmmaker says he truly empathises with his subjects, and finds cause for optimism in their lives. “I got inspirational stories from this. This is part of the piece – inspiration comes from other people. It is the idea that your life is about other people who can help you through relationships – that intact families can help you make it through,” he says.

So is he arguing, quite simply, that a support system provided by the state or other agency, no matter how good it is, is ultimately no substitute for families and relationships? Savage says emphatically: “It really isn’t. Whatever the help is – and there is good help around – that is not what happiness is about. For the film Out of Control I went and looked at prisons. Prisons themselves can be quite good buildings, but it was the lives of those kids... A hostel is not necessarily a terrible place – it is about the lives within.”