Cathy Come Home at 60: Inside the groundbreaking Ken Loach drama crowned best one-of-drama of all time

Can TV change people’s thinking? Never is this debated without a mention of Cathy Come Home. Sixty years ago, TV screenwriter Jeremy Sandford shocked the nation with his harrowing drama that followed a young couple and their children as they spiralled into homelessness, failed by the social-care system of 1960s Britain.

Part of BBC One’s ground-breaking Wednesday Play strand, it was shot on film in gritty locations in London and the Midlands. Producer Tony Garnett (who later made Kes, Law and Order and This Life) set the scene for Radio Times in November 1966: “Just a simple love story. But things don’t turn out for Cathy quite like that.

"Events cruelly overtake her and Reg – and later their children. They begin a journey through Britain, but it’s a Britain many of us have never seen... But it’s happening now and is likely to go on happening to lots of people for a long time.”

Watched by 12 million, Cathy Come Home had an immediate impact: the BBC switchboard was jammed, and questions were raised in Parliament.

The charity Crisis was founded the following year. RT’s mailbag overflowed with praise and empathy. “Unquestionably, the most realistic documentary-drama ever presented,” wrote reader RE Doherty from Manchester. “Authentic, factual, meticulous, a TV breakthrough. Please give us more realism like this to start controversy.”

Writing for RT in 1968, Sandford evaluated his film’s impact: “The facts of Cathy have often been questioned but, I claim, cannot be faulted. The eviction, the fire, life in the slum – all these scenes were modelled on life. The taking of children from their parents doesn’t often happen by force, but it does happen.”

He offered the startling statistic that “5,000 children are in care for no other reason than that their parents can find no home for them”.

RT never had the chance to interview Carol White, who gave a nerve-shattering performance as Cathy. She died in 1991 aged 48. When we caught up with actor Ray Brooks in 1973, he revealed that White had suggested him for the role of her husband Reg. “Carol’s young children were to be Cathy’s in the play, and Carol was worried that the filming would upset them. So I was a sort of chaperone.”

He explained, “A lot of Cathy was unscripted and made itself up as it went along. Carol (with pillows stuffed up her clothes) and I answered genuine accommodation ads. But when people saw she was pregnant, they invariably turned us away.” After Cathy was shown, “People didn’t realise I was acting. They thought it was a documentary. I was physically attacked by a man in the street who demanded to know why I’d left my wife and children.”

In a 1998 poll marking RT’s 75th anniversary, readers voted Cathy Come Home the best one-off drama of all time. In 2000, a BFI survey of the finest ever TV shows ranked it second only to Fawlty Towers.

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The drama’s director Ken Loach, long one of Britain’s most lauded film-makers, spoke to RT in 2022: “We knew we were onto something, but the outcry after the broadcast was extraordinary. Homelessness was a national scandal. Families with children were given emergency accommodation that was very basic and, for those who could not move on, it was so bad it felt like a punishment for being poor.”

Though decades had passed, Loach observed, “Homelessness is worse than ever and children suffer the most. Cathy is still on the streets, but her story may not be told with the raw savagery it deserves.”

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Ken Loach Remembers... Cathy Come Home airs Wednesday 11 November at 10pm on BBC Four. Cathy Come Home follows straight after at 10.15pm. Catch up on BBC iPlayer.

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