Skint Estate: A memoir of poverty, motherhood and survival

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Rain Dogs, the BBC’s new comedy drama from Skint Estate author Cash Carraway is many things: dark, hilarious, crushing, filthy, engrossing, powerful. The main characters are of Korean, Vietnamese and Japanese heritage, but Beef doesn’t focus exclusively on themes exploring race.

BBC/Sid Gentle Films/HBO ‘Lairy elan’: Daisy May Cooper, right, with ‘nuanced’ newcomer Fleur Tashjian in Rain Dogs.In the face of all this crap, she manages to have humour and an insane amount of love for her daughter. Carraway's love provides hope, even in the bleakest of moments: her daughter inspires her and gives her strength to fight for a better life. Cash Carraway’s memoir of her life as a single mother on the margins of austerity Britain is touching and, surprisingly, given its subject matter, very funny too. She has escaped from her boyfriend, the father of her child, who left her with a black eye and the parting words “abort it or I’ll abort it for you”.

Following her striking 2019 memoir, Skint Estate, Cash Carraway has created this eight-part drama – and the result is authentic, original and well worth tuning in to.

Skint opens with a piece written by McGee, with Saoirse-Monica Jackson turning the keen edge of madness she brings to Derry Girls to equally fine use as Tara. It is a role that is much closer to tragedy than comedy – which is not to say it is without laughs, black though they are.

This week’s participants in a deliberately lo-fi, rambling conversation are Jessica Hynes, Emmanuel Sonubi, Amy Gledhill and Patrick Kielty. It is also a reminder that poverty in this country is not confined to one place: there are windowless bedsits with both town mice and country mice. This book should be compulsive reading for all Daily Mail journalists and readers, who think that somehow people living on benefits in the UK all live in palaces with more income than "decent, honest working folk" etc etc ad nauseum.Thank you very much to Netgalley and Penguin Random House for allowing me to read an eARC copy of Skint Estate.

Just as Amy and Danny oscillate between sympathetic and deranged, the characters around them are also complicated: from Danny’s crypto-currency-obsessed brother, Paul (Young Mazino), to Amy’s drippy husband, George, played by Joseph Lee (“I’m micro-dosing my creativity”). When she falls pregnant, she switches to a job as a peep-show model — as one of her better-paid jobs, it allows her to save up three months’ rental deposit on a flat. From the creator of HBO and BBC's Rain Dogs, Skint Estate is the hard-hitting, blunt, dignified and brutally revealing debut memoir about impoverishment, loneliness and violence in austerity Britain - set against a grim landscape of sink estates, police cells, refuges and peepshows - skilfully woven into a manifesto for change.

De är på väg till frälsningsarmén för att få mat och dottern (lika gammal som min) dokumenterar allt i sin anteckningsbok. A teaser shares: “Told with a dark lick of humour and an anarchic attitude, Cash Carraway (w/t) skewers stereotypes of what it means to be working class and underlines the importance of love, dreams and friendships.