When Deirdre Kelly agreed to appear in a documentary about community spirit, she had no idea what she was in for. Benefits Street would make 'White Dee' a household name – pariah to some, hero to others. So what now?
Broadcasting House in central London is less than 120 miles away from James Turner Street, but the expression on its most famous resident's face suggests she has landed on another planet. Through the window she gazes out at a great kerfuffle of cameras and lights as a One Show presenter is filmed abseiling off the roof. At a nearby table a pair of journalists are loudly discussing Syria. Opposite her sits a garrulous fellow called Barry, who looks like he could be an old mate of Ozzy Osbourne, finds everything funny, keeps mouthing "I love you" at me, and is here in his capacity as her newly appointed manager and agent. In less than three hours she will be interviewed live on Newsnight.
Had anyone described this scene to Deirdre Kelly 10 weeks ago, she would have thought they were mad. Back then she thought she was about to appear in a Channel 4 documentary about community spirit in her rundown neighbourhood. She didn't expect to feature much in the series, nor imagine that many people would watch. But as the standout star of C4's ratings sensation Benefits Street, White Dee became a household name overnight. Vilified by critics as the "patron saint of drug addicts and dropouts", and lauded by fans as a working-class hero, hers is the latest – and possibly least likely – life to be turned inside out by a television show.
"I've had offers from all over the world for all sorts of things," she marvels. "Modelling, newspaper columns, cooking, holidays. I've just recorded a rap record with an up-and-coming band. I can't fathom it all out, to be honest with you. I'm just like: 'Why me?'"
The only explanation Dee can come up with for our fascination with her is that viewers can relate to her. "I think a lot of people have seen that I'm exactly like them. I'm just an ordinary, everyday person." But that's not how many high-profile critics saw the heavy-smoking, frequently swearing, single mother of two. Journalists and politicians who'd expressed horror while the series was on air subsequently came face-to-face with Dee in two live TV debates, where it quickly became apparent that they were rather frightened of her. "To them," she observes, "I'm the unknown, aren't I? I don't know if they're just stuck in their little bubble, or what,"– and in that she may well have put her finger on the key to the current anti-benefits discourse. It's only possible to draw sweeping conclusions about welfare from a heavily edited portrayal of one woman on the telly if she is literally unrecognisable as a human being.
In fact, Dee is enormously likable. Unaffected yet knowing, she is very direct and can be extremely funny, with a natural gift for comic timing. She is also one of the most tolerant, least judgmental people I've ever met, and remarkably pragmatic about the hand she has been dealt. She is still angry with the programme's makers for lying about the sort of documentary they wanted to make, "but I'm not complaining about the way I've been portrayed, because obviously, hopefully, it will lead to things that will be good for my children". For the first time in her life, she is in a position to command attention, and is now trying to work out what to do with it. "The show did us bad – but no one would really give two hoots about what I had to say before. If we can make good out of it, then brilliant."
Dee realised she'd been deceived when she discovered that they'd called the series Benefits Street just two weeks before it went on air. When residents were shown episode one, "we couldn't believe what we were watching. We went mad. People growing drugs, smoking drugs, shoplifting. That is not what our street is about. Half the people they showed don't even live in our street. We knew from that second that we were well and truly screwed over by them." But she was still completely unprepared for its impact.
Within 12 hours of episode one being broadcast, reporters were mobbing her house, eggs were pelted at her door from passing cars, and Twitter was awash with "pure hatred, vicious hatred. It was horrible, really really horrible." The notoriously unkind social commentator Katie Hopkins delivered the most wounding blow, calling her a bad mum whose children should be taken into care. Dee's wounded indignation is equalled only by her bewilderment at this presumption of entitlement to judge.
"She doesn't know me," she keeps saying. "I've never expressed such a hurtful opinion towards someone I don't know, or their children. I wouldn't look at someone and say: 'Oh my God, I don't like the look of you.'" When I ask what kind of behaviour or lifestyle she would consider beyond the pale in a neighbour, she struggles to think of anything – "that's a tough one, that is"– and eventually comes up with sex offending. "I'm just not a 'bad terms' kind of person. I don't really harbour any bad feeling for anybody." Until five years ago she was an office worker, but when I ask how she used to feel about people on benefits, the question makes no sense to her. "I didn't feel anything about people on benefits, because that's their situation, and you don't know everyone's circumstances. So I honestly didn't feel anything."
Had the series been about any other street in Britain, she would never have watched it. "No, because you've got a programme labelled Benefits Street – in my mind, whoever's going to be on that show is going to be made a fool of, 'cos that's what they normally do. Benefits is just a situation that you're in at that time, and everyone's circumstances are different; everyone has different reasons for being on benefits. So we can't just judge everybody as one. So I would never watch a show called Benefits Street, 'cos I can't stand watching someone be belittled in TV shows or documentaries."
One of the most striking things about Dee is that she makes no attempt to spin her own story for sympathy. The daughter of Irish immigrants, she describes her childhood as "amazing"; her father always worked, her mother was a housewife, and she joined a youth training scheme the day she turned 16. Her relationship with the father of her 16-year-old daughter, Cailtin, lasted for 12 years, until "something happened and I had to get him to leave", but she won't elaborate. "I could make him look bad, but I'm not going to. The past is the past."
Following Caitlin's birth, she was diagnosed with postnatal depression, but dismissed it until her mother died two years ago, at which point she went to pieces. At first she tried to conceal her depression, but she is now under the care of a mental health team, who have put her on antidepressants but doubt that the bereavement explains her condition, and suspect she may be bipolar. She hasn't even been able to visit her father since her mother died. She gets as far as his front door but then panics, and has to go home. "I just can't do it. I can't go in, 'cos she's not there. He's 75 and he has to visit me. That's awful, isn't it?"
Critics have accused her of playing the depression card to get out of work, because we never saw her looking unwell on Benefits Street. But depression, Dee points out, is not exactly telegenic, so of course it was edited out. I don't think Channel 4 are entirely to blame for obscuring the extent of her illness, however, for I get the impression that Dee herself is embarrassed to talk about it. She talks in vague terms of having "down days", and only acknowledges a paralysis of overwhelmingly bleak despair when I probe gently for details. She had been due to appear on Newsnight three days earlier, but was too unwell to manage the journey from Birmingham, let alone a media interview, so had to cancel. "I don't like letting people down, and that's what happened last week. I weren't well. But then I felt so bad and guilty, 'cos I'd let people down, and that just made it even worse." When the Newsnight presenter challenged Dee on air about why she wasn't fit to work, I expected to hear her point out the previous cancellation, but she didn't even mention it.
Dee now finds herself in a slightly surreal predicament. Having been on benefits for five years, she is being bombarded with all sorts of lucrative offers that many celebrities would kill for. "Everybody knows where I live, so they were just coming through the door with everyday post, and I would just open them and go, 'Oh my god', and then close them and put them in a pile. I haven't got a clue how things work. I've never mixed in these circles. I just get the kids up for school, cook them dinner, get them to bed, get up the next day and do exactly the same."
So when a friend put her in touch with Barry, it was quite a relief. A local music publicist, he cuts an eccentrically comedic figure, and seems to suit her very well, but Dee still isn't sure what to do about the offers. She can't commit to anything because she can never predict if she will be well, so it's impossible to make plans. "How do you decide anything? I don't know. Everything that comes in I think, 'Well, that's a joke,' but it's not a joke. It's deadly serious."
It's been widely reported that she plans to stand as an independent candidate in her constituency at the next election, but in fact what she said is that she would run against Kwasi Kwarteng, a Tory MP who denounced her as "too common for the House of Commons". But I'd be very surprised if that actually happens. When I ask if she wants her life to change radically, the long pause says as much as her eventual response. "I don't know. I still want to be me. If it impacts on my children, then no."
Then again, Dee would love to be able to take her children on holiday. "Mum used to pay for us to go to like Skegness or Weston-super-Mare. If it weren't for mum and dad, my children would have probably never ever had a holiday." Before Benefits Street, her biggest worries had been her children's birthdays and Christmas. "What can I buy them? They're not children who want want want, but as a parent the guilt's for you, not for them." I ask what her biggest worries are now, and she says, "Still the same. 'Cos I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know what the future's going to hold. I just want my children to succeed in life."
Dee knows she could spend at least the next few years earning lots of money as a professional reality TV contestant. There has already been excitable interest from Big Brother and I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here!, and critics on the right might well say she is morally obliged to accept their offers. How can she continue to take money from the state, when she has these golden opportunities? But those same critics also accuse her of being a feckless bad mother, so I wonder what they would make of her answer. "I could do those shows. But I'm not going to sacrifice my kids. I've never been without my kids. I'm a parent first."
If it weren't for her responsibilities as a mother, would the reality circuit appeal to her? "Course it would!" she laughs. "People offering to throw money at me for this, that and the other? But it's not all about the money. I'm not the type of person who would give up being a proper mum just for money." Reported by guardian.co.uk 4 hours ago.
Broadcasting House in central London is less than 120 miles away from James Turner Street, but the expression on its most famous resident's face suggests she has landed on another planet. Through the window she gazes out at a great kerfuffle of cameras and lights as a One Show presenter is filmed abseiling off the roof. At a nearby table a pair of journalists are loudly discussing Syria. Opposite her sits a garrulous fellow called Barry, who looks like he could be an old mate of Ozzy Osbourne, finds everything funny, keeps mouthing "I love you" at me, and is here in his capacity as her newly appointed manager and agent. In less than three hours she will be interviewed live on Newsnight.
Had anyone described this scene to Deirdre Kelly 10 weeks ago, she would have thought they were mad. Back then she thought she was about to appear in a Channel 4 documentary about community spirit in her rundown neighbourhood. She didn't expect to feature much in the series, nor imagine that many people would watch. But as the standout star of C4's ratings sensation Benefits Street, White Dee became a household name overnight. Vilified by critics as the "patron saint of drug addicts and dropouts", and lauded by fans as a working-class hero, hers is the latest – and possibly least likely – life to be turned inside out by a television show.
"I've had offers from all over the world for all sorts of things," she marvels. "Modelling, newspaper columns, cooking, holidays. I've just recorded a rap record with an up-and-coming band. I can't fathom it all out, to be honest with you. I'm just like: 'Why me?'"
The only explanation Dee can come up with for our fascination with her is that viewers can relate to her. "I think a lot of people have seen that I'm exactly like them. I'm just an ordinary, everyday person." But that's not how many high-profile critics saw the heavy-smoking, frequently swearing, single mother of two. Journalists and politicians who'd expressed horror while the series was on air subsequently came face-to-face with Dee in two live TV debates, where it quickly became apparent that they were rather frightened of her. "To them," she observes, "I'm the unknown, aren't I? I don't know if they're just stuck in their little bubble, or what,"– and in that she may well have put her finger on the key to the current anti-benefits discourse. It's only possible to draw sweeping conclusions about welfare from a heavily edited portrayal of one woman on the telly if she is literally unrecognisable as a human being.
In fact, Dee is enormously likable. Unaffected yet knowing, she is very direct and can be extremely funny, with a natural gift for comic timing. She is also one of the most tolerant, least judgmental people I've ever met, and remarkably pragmatic about the hand she has been dealt. She is still angry with the programme's makers for lying about the sort of documentary they wanted to make, "but I'm not complaining about the way I've been portrayed, because obviously, hopefully, it will lead to things that will be good for my children". For the first time in her life, she is in a position to command attention, and is now trying to work out what to do with it. "The show did us bad – but no one would really give two hoots about what I had to say before. If we can make good out of it, then brilliant."
Dee realised she'd been deceived when she discovered that they'd called the series Benefits Street just two weeks before it went on air. When residents were shown episode one, "we couldn't believe what we were watching. We went mad. People growing drugs, smoking drugs, shoplifting. That is not what our street is about. Half the people they showed don't even live in our street. We knew from that second that we were well and truly screwed over by them." But she was still completely unprepared for its impact.
Within 12 hours of episode one being broadcast, reporters were mobbing her house, eggs were pelted at her door from passing cars, and Twitter was awash with "pure hatred, vicious hatred. It was horrible, really really horrible." The notoriously unkind social commentator Katie Hopkins delivered the most wounding blow, calling her a bad mum whose children should be taken into care. Dee's wounded indignation is equalled only by her bewilderment at this presumption of entitlement to judge.
"She doesn't know me," she keeps saying. "I've never expressed such a hurtful opinion towards someone I don't know, or their children. I wouldn't look at someone and say: 'Oh my God, I don't like the look of you.'" When I ask what kind of behaviour or lifestyle she would consider beyond the pale in a neighbour, she struggles to think of anything – "that's a tough one, that is"– and eventually comes up with sex offending. "I'm just not a 'bad terms' kind of person. I don't really harbour any bad feeling for anybody." Until five years ago she was an office worker, but when I ask how she used to feel about people on benefits, the question makes no sense to her. "I didn't feel anything about people on benefits, because that's their situation, and you don't know everyone's circumstances. So I honestly didn't feel anything."
Had the series been about any other street in Britain, she would never have watched it. "No, because you've got a programme labelled Benefits Street – in my mind, whoever's going to be on that show is going to be made a fool of, 'cos that's what they normally do. Benefits is just a situation that you're in at that time, and everyone's circumstances are different; everyone has different reasons for being on benefits. So we can't just judge everybody as one. So I would never watch a show called Benefits Street, 'cos I can't stand watching someone be belittled in TV shows or documentaries."
One of the most striking things about Dee is that she makes no attempt to spin her own story for sympathy. The daughter of Irish immigrants, she describes her childhood as "amazing"; her father always worked, her mother was a housewife, and she joined a youth training scheme the day she turned 16. Her relationship with the father of her 16-year-old daughter, Cailtin, lasted for 12 years, until "something happened and I had to get him to leave", but she won't elaborate. "I could make him look bad, but I'm not going to. The past is the past."
Following Caitlin's birth, she was diagnosed with postnatal depression, but dismissed it until her mother died two years ago, at which point she went to pieces. At first she tried to conceal her depression, but she is now under the care of a mental health team, who have put her on antidepressants but doubt that the bereavement explains her condition, and suspect she may be bipolar. She hasn't even been able to visit her father since her mother died. She gets as far as his front door but then panics, and has to go home. "I just can't do it. I can't go in, 'cos she's not there. He's 75 and he has to visit me. That's awful, isn't it?"
Critics have accused her of playing the depression card to get out of work, because we never saw her looking unwell on Benefits Street. But depression, Dee points out, is not exactly telegenic, so of course it was edited out. I don't think Channel 4 are entirely to blame for obscuring the extent of her illness, however, for I get the impression that Dee herself is embarrassed to talk about it. She talks in vague terms of having "down days", and only acknowledges a paralysis of overwhelmingly bleak despair when I probe gently for details. She had been due to appear on Newsnight three days earlier, but was too unwell to manage the journey from Birmingham, let alone a media interview, so had to cancel. "I don't like letting people down, and that's what happened last week. I weren't well. But then I felt so bad and guilty, 'cos I'd let people down, and that just made it even worse." When the Newsnight presenter challenged Dee on air about why she wasn't fit to work, I expected to hear her point out the previous cancellation, but she didn't even mention it.
Dee now finds herself in a slightly surreal predicament. Having been on benefits for five years, she is being bombarded with all sorts of lucrative offers that many celebrities would kill for. "Everybody knows where I live, so they were just coming through the door with everyday post, and I would just open them and go, 'Oh my god', and then close them and put them in a pile. I haven't got a clue how things work. I've never mixed in these circles. I just get the kids up for school, cook them dinner, get them to bed, get up the next day and do exactly the same."
So when a friend put her in touch with Barry, it was quite a relief. A local music publicist, he cuts an eccentrically comedic figure, and seems to suit her very well, but Dee still isn't sure what to do about the offers. She can't commit to anything because she can never predict if she will be well, so it's impossible to make plans. "How do you decide anything? I don't know. Everything that comes in I think, 'Well, that's a joke,' but it's not a joke. It's deadly serious."
It's been widely reported that she plans to stand as an independent candidate in her constituency at the next election, but in fact what she said is that she would run against Kwasi Kwarteng, a Tory MP who denounced her as "too common for the House of Commons". But I'd be very surprised if that actually happens. When I ask if she wants her life to change radically, the long pause says as much as her eventual response. "I don't know. I still want to be me. If it impacts on my children, then no."
Then again, Dee would love to be able to take her children on holiday. "Mum used to pay for us to go to like Skegness or Weston-super-Mare. If it weren't for mum and dad, my children would have probably never ever had a holiday." Before Benefits Street, her biggest worries had been her children's birthdays and Christmas. "What can I buy them? They're not children who want want want, but as a parent the guilt's for you, not for them." I ask what her biggest worries are now, and she says, "Still the same. 'Cos I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know what the future's going to hold. I just want my children to succeed in life."
Dee knows she could spend at least the next few years earning lots of money as a professional reality TV contestant. There has already been excitable interest from Big Brother and I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here!, and critics on the right might well say she is morally obliged to accept their offers. How can she continue to take money from the state, when she has these golden opportunities? But those same critics also accuse her of being a feckless bad mother, so I wonder what they would make of her answer. "I could do those shows. But I'm not going to sacrifice my kids. I've never been without my kids. I'm a parent first."
If it weren't for her responsibilities as a mother, would the reality circuit appeal to her? "Course it would!" she laughs. "People offering to throw money at me for this, that and the other? But it's not all about the money. I'm not the type of person who would give up being a proper mum just for money." Reported by guardian.co.uk 4 hours ago.