60 Days on the Streets review – truly revelatory TV that damns us all

Ed Stafford’s vivid account of sleeping rough humanised the homeless – and exposed the cruelty and pettiness of the general public

Hannibal Lecter once asked himself as he scoured the faces of a crowd at a torture-instrument exhibition in Florence: “What still slaps the clammy flab of our submissive consciousness hard enough to get our attention?”

One answer came in 60 Days on the Streets, a documentary from the ex-army captain and seasoned explorer Ed Stafford. It details (in the first of three parts – subsequent episodes see him visit London and Glasgow) his time spent living homeless in Manchester. If the Hannibal quote seems too Grand Guignol in the circumstances, you can’t have been paying attention to Stafford’s deep dive into the underworld of Britain’s northern capital city. Spice addicts stand drooping in the streets like zombies while passers by – well, pass by, as oblivious to them as they temporarily and presumably blissfully are to the world. Knock-down, drag-out fights play out against flickering lights in underpasses, or in plain daylight, leaving blood spatters on the pavement. Outside her carefully constructed shelter against a wall, a woman dries her socks on the door of the mobile police unit abutting her new non-home.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2FcJ5pK