Hard Up review – hard-hitting poverty tales the PM ought to hear

Hard Up (BBC Three) is a little documentary series that punches far above its weight. Over three short episodes, each barely reaching 20 minutes, it tells the stories of young people living in north Devon. “People think Devon’s all beaches and farms,” says the charismatic Titch, although she is not particularly enamoured with the biscuit-tin beauty sold to tourists and second-homers. Nor is the director Aodh Breathnach, who takes an insightful look beyond the picturesque countryside to find out what impact the seasonal economy is having on the county’s youth.

Breathnach approaches his subjects with kindness and humanity. He divides Hard Up into three topics – housing, work and crime – all of which are tangled up in the region’s dependence on tourism. North Devon has one of the highest rates of youth homelessness in the country, and Kaye, an outreach worker for rough sleepers, explains the difficulties tourism brings for people who live in the region year-round. Six-month tenancies are common, because properties can be rented out all summer for more money; at the end of six months, as the season kicks off, people are turfed out, unable to afford the inflated rents. Second homes are left unoccupied much of the year. Kaye tries to find a bed in a B&B for a vulnerable man sleeping beneath an old train carriage, but the school holidays are about to begin and nothing is available. She visits a woman sleeping rough in a cemetery, who knocks back a bottle of vodka as they chat. “She’s so young,” Kaye says afterwards, exasperated by the fact that, in this moment, there is nothing she can do. “It’s times like this when I would really like to livestream direct to the House of bloody Commons.”

The problems extend to work, too. Over the past 30 years, half a million young people have left coastal towns, presumably in search of a more regular and reliable income. The second episode, Hustling for Work, is the standout, and focuses mainly on Titch, a 20-year-old firecracker who has ambitions of becoming a photographer. Her life story is told beautifully and teased out slowly; she had a serious illness as a young girl, then experienced bullying and was kicked out of home at 18. She now lives in a shared house and is friends mostly with the homeless people in her home town who, she says, would be there for her in a second if ever she needed them. Titch has been taking their photographs, documenting what she calls life on the outside. She is funny, sharp and has a greater understanding of people than most others twice her age.

Finally, we meet Joshua, a 29-year-old boxer who is trying to get back in the ring after a punch-up on a night out led him away from a promising boxing career and into a two-year prison sentence. Joshua’s story, too, is laid out empathetically. His mother, now dead, was an addict, but “there were times she was amazing”, he says, sweetly. When he started school in Devon, he experienced racist abuse on his first day; he didn’t even know what the word he was called meant, but when he understood it he broke the boy’s nose. His partner, April, says, touchingly, that the boxing ring is the only place that never let him down.

Hard Up crams a lot in, but it does so with a light touch. There are a couple of moments when the narrative feels a little forced – Titch is working up to an exhibition of her pictures, Joshua is preparing to get back in the ring – and, although it doesn’t suffer from this structure, it doesn’t need it. These are human stories, handled carefully, told well. It is funny – the man growing cannabis in his rented house has to pack his equipment down for a property inspection, and shoves it into a box marked “garden stuff” – and respectful of the complexities of human beings, particularly those at the mercy of an inconsistent economy. When Griggy, a boxing trainer in Bideford, talks about the young men who come through his gym, he knows most of them have been in some sort of trouble. “We don’t judge none of ’em,” he says.

Hard Up has taken this to heart. It made me think of the unmourned age of “poverty porn” TV, when reality-adjacent shows such as Benefits Street and Skint stirred up trouble to look at or, more accurately, to look down at poor communities. Like The Mighty Redcar before it, Hard Up suggests that gawping has been replaced by humour and compassion. Hopefully the people who need to hear these stories, perhaps someone from the House of bloody Commons, will, through a programme such as this, find them harder to ignore.