Cathy is organized as a narrative about a young woman who marries, has children, and then—following an accident to her husband that results in his loss of job and the subsequent impoverishment of their family—suffers various states of homelessness in poor or temporary accommodation until her children are taken into care by the social services. The program adopts an episodic structure, depicting the stages in the decline of Cathy and her family across a number of years. Both as a play and as a kind of documentary, Cathy Come Home is held together by the commentary of Cathy herself, a commentary that is given in a self-reflective past tense and that not only introduces and ends the program but is heard regularly throughout it, providing a bridge between episodes and a source of additional explanation to that obtained by watching the dramatic action.

One “documentary” element in Cathy is seen in the program’s visual style. In addition, the play resembles a documentary in that a large amount of research on the problem of homelessness went into the writing of the script and because the script devotes considerable time to depicting aspects of this problem as it advances the storyline concerning Cathy and her family.

Stylistically, a number of scenes in the program are shot in the documentary mode of action-led camera, with events appearing to develop spontaneously and to be “caught” by the filming. The resultant effect is one of high immediacy values, providing the viewer with a strong sense of being a “witness.” Where the script broadens its scope to situate Cathy’s story in the context of homelessness as a more general problem, camera work and sound recording produce a scopic field and address to the viewer that resemble conventional reportage. For instance, in a scene in a crowed tenement block, we hear the anonymous voices of occupants on the soundtrack while various shots are combined to produce a montage of “place,” of “environment.” Similarly, toward the end of the film, when Cathy and her children enter the lowest class of hostel accommodation, the camera not only situates them in the crowded dormitory they have entered but offers “snapshot” case histories of some of the other women living there. Some of this information comes through voice-over, some in speech to camera, as if addressed to Cathy herself. The documentarist element is more directly present in the use of commentary and brief “viewpoint” voice-over at several points in the film. These moments offer statistics on the housing situation and allow various perspectives on it to be heard in a manner that directly follows conventional documentary practice.

Thus, Cathy plays with the codes of reportage and merges them with those of realist drama. The developing story, however, often shown through an exploration of private, intimate space, requires that the film be organized principally as narrative fiction, moving outward to establish a documentary framing of context at a number of points and then closing back in on “story.” Since the story is a particularization of the general problem, however, movement between “story” and “report” often involves no sharp disjunctions, substantive or stylistic.

The initial critical response to the program was generally positive, but public discussion tended to circulate around two issues—the possibility that the audience would be deceived into according a greater “truth” to Cathy than was warranted by its fictional status, and the way the account was a “biased” one, depicting officials as uncaring and often hostile in a way that would have been unacceptable in a conventional documentary.

It is hard to imagine a viewer so unskilled in the conventions of television as to believe that Cathy was “reality” footage, so extensively is it conceived of in terms of narrative fiction. However, doubt clearly existed in some viewers’ minds as to whether it was a story based directly on a real incident or whether (as was actually the case) Cathy’s tale was a construction developed from a range of research materials. Several commentators queried the legitimacy of combining the dramatic license to articulate a viewpoint through character and action, on the one hand, with the documentary requirement to be “impartial,” on the other— a perspective that often revealed a certain amount of naiveté on the commentators’ part about the veracity of “straight documentary.”

Against these complaints, other critics defended the program makers’ right to use dramatic emotional devices in order to engage the viewer with public issues, pointing to the way in which the program’s view of officialdom was essentially the view held by Cathy herself—in their eyes, this was a perfectly proper use of character viewpoint from which audience members could measure their own empathetic distance.

In British television history, then, Cathy Come Home remains an important marker in the long-running debate about television and truth. This should not be allowed to overshadow its own qualities as a work of social imagination, however, and as an exploration in “hybridized” forms that sometimes brilliantly prefigures much later shifts in the modes of address of factual television.