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Michael Sheen is visiting Bulldogs, a boxing gym in Port Talbot. He’s talking to the gym’s manager Ceri, a full-time worker and a single mum. Ceri has £12,000 worth of credit card debt and, at various points, has been forced to use food banks. She’d love to own her own home but, as you might gather, despite a reasonably positive career trajectory, that’s currently a pipe dream.
How did basic survival become so ridiculously difficult in what remains a fundamentally wealthy country? And can television, with a touch of star power on the side, help to address this question? While TV dramas, from Cathy Come Home in 1966 to Mr Bates vs The Post Office last year, have had some success in shifting the conversation around scandals and social issues and prompting real change, the record of campaigning factual TV has been patchy at best. The presenter Vicky Pattison’s recent salvo against revenge porn, for example, was a misfire. Jamie Oliver’s attempts to address Britain’s terrible school dinners ran into a toxic slew of issues around both culture and basic economics. Is it possible that television simply isn’t cut out to make a difference on these terms?
What the actor is attempting in Michael Sheen’s Secret Million Pound Giveaway seems both simple and terrifyingly complex. He wants to use £100,000 of his own money to write off a million pounds worth of personal debt. In so doing, he’ll help a bunch of blameless, struggling individuals while making a series of wider points – firstly, that a whole ecosystem of bottom-feeders has developed around Britain’s cost of living crisis; secondly, and most pertinently, that these sums of money are essentially hypothetical. Liabilities are sold on, becoming less valuable as they sink through the dank, shark-ridden waters of the secondary debt market.
This process seems (and in fact, is) incredibly dull, and no amount of slightly patronising explainers using tiny cardboard cut-outs of George Clooney can mitigate that. But it’s also deadly; leeching off those least able to defend themselves and sucking the life out of them. It’s capitalism at its absolute rock-bottom worst, resulting in obscenities like the 19-year-old cited in this programme who borrowed £500 and ended up paying back more than five grand. Nice work if you can get it.
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It’s important to stress that Sheen’s motivations here are unimpeachable. Born in Newport, he has never lost affinity with his roots in south Wales – and he’s put his money where his mouth is often enough to be given the benefit of any doubt that might exist. These are his people and he feels their pain – at one point, as he’s sitting in the local cafe pondering the decimation of Port Talbot’s steel industry, he’s unable to hold back tears.
But the problem is, this isn’t just a local issue. It’s systemic and nationwide. It’s a problem that’s been decades in the making. What happens to people and communities when wages and opportunity don’t keep pace with the cost of food, energy and housing? For all the relief that must be involved in learning that your debt no longer exists, catharsis would be inappropriate here. There’s a grammar to TV shows (from The Secret Millionaire to Undercover Boss) in which munificence is bestowed by the powerful onto the powerless. It would be horribly out of place here and thankfully, it never comes. Sheen will never know whose debt he’s bought and written off, and thank goodness for that. This subject matter is too raw and too profoundly widespread to fit the formula for emotional pornography. It would be like celebrating finding an Elastoplast to apply to a compound fracture.
Much more fitting is the conclusion; surely one of the most anticlimactic climaxes to any programme of this type in living memory. This is a problem that demands political engagement. Sheen talks to Lloyd Hatton, an MP who is pushing a Fair Banking Act. He enlists the help of Gordon Brown, who he hopes will get him through oak-panelled Treasury doors. “I will ensure you have the meetings you need,” the former prime minister says. And then nothing. The government’s financial inclusion committee is going to meet this month, we’re told, with affordable credit on the agenda. A call to action is met by a shrug.
And there’s the rub. This actually feels like a perfect illustration of the problems facing this kind of campaigning TV. Change is glacial if it happens at all. It bumps up against government inertia, vested interests and the febrile news agenda. It runs out of steam. The one major argument for involving celebrities is that their presence might open doors as well as minds but that doesn’t seem to have worked here. Sheen, we can be certain, won’t be giving up and given the bleakness of the situation, what a joy it would be for me to eat these mildly sceptical words.
At the end, we revisit Ceri from the gym. Have her circumstances changed for the better in the 18 months it’s taken to make this programme? Not so much. She’s moved back in with her parents, which, in 2025 seems to be the only default option for members of the British precariat lucky enough to have parents with a spare room. No magic then, just confirmation that there are wounds here that no amount of small screen good intentions can heal.
