THE saying goes that you can’t understand someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes, and few people understand that sentiment as well as former Army captain and explorer turned documentarist Ed Stafford.
In his 60 Days… programmes, Stafford (47), spends 60 days and nights immersing himself in the subject of his documentary. In March 2019 he spent 60 Days on the Streets, and in February 2022 he spent 60 Days with the Gypsies, and now, in a new Channel 4 series, he’s spending 60 Days on the Estates with the residents of some of the UK’s most infamous housing estates.
Along with a small crew, and equipped with his own camera, Stafford is setting out to capture what it’s really like to live on notorious estates – London’s Northumberland Park, Glasgow’s Easterhouse and Birmingham’s Ladywood – particularly in the midst of a cost of living and housing crisis that is compounding issues such as gang violence and addiction.
Let’s hear from the man himself about his experience learning about the highs and lows of life in these oft-neglected communities.
WHY DID YOU WANT TO MAKE THIS SERIES? I think it’s all too easy, isn’t it, to build a picture of estates that’s not necessarily accurate, because all the information that you have is from media reports, and therefore you get an out-of-skew idea of life on these estates. And I thought: that’s not necessarily how life is. And so as ever, with the stuff that I’ve done, it’s like: well, OK, the way of really digging underneath that is to go in and actually spend time there, isn’t it? It’s not going in, having a five-minute chat with somebody, getting a little soundbite and taking it out of context, and being all salacious about it. It’s going in and speaking to the people, listening to the people, and allowing them to tell the story, hopefully, in their own words as much as possible. And that’s what we tried to do. And I think it was the positive stories that hopefully help rewrite those sort of reputations.
Like, for example, the community spirit, which, across all three episodes, was something that we kept seeing again and again. The people with the least, who were having the toughest times at the moment, all coming together, all helping each other, all showing amazing acts of human kindness.
WHAT DID YOU FIND WERE THE MAIN CHALLENGES DURING SHOOTING? Not everyone wants to film. I mean, increasingly people are mistrusting, I think, of TV these days, they always think that they’re going to be taken out of context and made to look stupid… We weren’t out to stitch people up, we just wanted to tell an honest story. But I think that the biggest challenge is always getting the right people, and finding the right contributors. It’s not living on the estate (that’s a challenge), obviously… sleeping in a bed in a flat is not a hardship, and so it wasn’t about me at all. It was important to not be that film crew that went home every day at five o’clock and stays in fancy hotels, and we didn’t want to be that. But I think it’s finding the right people that tell the story, that are representative of a wider community or a wider section of society… I think that’s the biggest challenge. It’s finding the right people and that will tell the story that you need to tell.
And then doing justice to their story, I guess, by asking the right questions, and then putting it all together in the right way.
DID ANYTHING SURPRISE OR SHOCK YOU? The standard of council accommodation. I know that the waiting list to get into social housing is vast, and then also the social housing standards are really low. Surely, more money needs to be allocated to that, because it is literally a reflection on our standard of living in the UK. I just think you can’t have that many people living in such substandard accommodation. That was hard hitting.
HOW DID YOU FEEL AT THE END OF THE EXPERIENCE? I think the whole thing was a privilege. A lot of people think that what I’m doing is difficult in terms of the physicality of it. It’s not. It literally is doing justice to the people that you speak to.
It’s always a privilege, and it’s always quite surprising that people are prepared to let you into their world and just talk about who they are, and their struggles, and their life, and their ups and downs, and when they do you feel special, you feel rewarded, and you feel trusted.
DO YOU THINK THAT BEING IMMERSED IN THIS WAY HAS CHANGED YOUR OPINION OF LIFE ON THESE NOTORIOUS ESTATES? I think things like this force you to actually be fully interested and immersed in the subject, and therefore you do realise that there’s a lot more going on. Whether it’s the community spirit and everyone coming together, or just lighter moments, that there is much more to life than just what the news reports might say. So yeah, I think it has, I think it’s made me realise that people are people, wherever they are, really. But in certain sections of the UK, life is definitely tougher, it really is. And if you’re born on a council estate, in some of the worst council estates in the UK, it is likely that your life will be quite significantly different. So yeah, it definitely has. It’s just made me more informed, I think.
60 Days on the Estates, Sundays, Channel 4, 9pm.
