The star of Channel 4’s controversial Benefits Street became an unlikely celebrity and will appear in another documentary next year
· See the Observer’s faces of 2014 in full here
· Kellie Maloney: ‘I achieved a lot as Frank. I could never totally lose him’
Deirdre Kelly, better known to most of us as White Dee, the undisputed star of Channel 4’s Benefits Street, opens the door of her home in Handsworth, Birmingham, resplendent in enormous baby-blue sheepskin slippers. To those who know anything at all about Kelly, the slippers – they’re like two great barges anchored at her ankles – will not come as a surprise; she is not, and never will be, a great one for dressing up. But her tired terraced house just might, given the cash she’s said to have made since her appearance on the controversial series (when she joined Celebrity Big Brother some months later, the tabloids suggested she’d received a £100,000 fee). “Yes, it’s not exactly a mansion, is it?” she says, her face crumpling into laughter. So, Dee, where has all the loot gone? Her voice rises indignantly. “It’s all exaggerated, Rachel. You don’t get paid every time you open your mouth, you know. In any case, hand on heart, I don’t need a big house. I’ve put the money in two bank accounts, so it’ll be there for my children if they ever need it.”
The house in question is 10 minutes from James Turner Street, where a team from Love Productions spent 18 months filming residents, the better to show what life on benefits is really like (or something). It belongs to a friend, who offered it to Kelly when things down the road got too much. “Channel 4 just put our addresses out there. I started getting what I call ‘jail mail’: letters [from prisoners] saying ‘you and me could spend the rest of our lives together’. Yes. Eeew. But it was also really scary. All they had to do was write ‘White Dee’ on the envelope: everyone knew where I was.” She pauses. It’s uncomfortable, sometimes, the fact of having to weigh the fury she feels towards Love Productions and Channel 4 against the fact that their not-so-subtle editing has provided her with an income (she hasn’t received welfare since May). “They lied to us,” she says. “They told us the series would be about community spirit, which we had in spades. We didn’t even know what it was going to be called until three weeks before it went out. Only when we watched it did we realise we’d been stitched up. But how can I knock it now?” She spreads her arms to suggest the vast riches that have unaccountably fallen into her lap, a gesture that’s oddly touching in the context of her spartan living room.
Continue reading... Reported by guardian.co.uk 15 hours ago.
· See the Observer’s faces of 2014 in full here
· Kellie Maloney: ‘I achieved a lot as Frank. I could never totally lose him’
Deirdre Kelly, better known to most of us as White Dee, the undisputed star of Channel 4’s Benefits Street, opens the door of her home in Handsworth, Birmingham, resplendent in enormous baby-blue sheepskin slippers. To those who know anything at all about Kelly, the slippers – they’re like two great barges anchored at her ankles – will not come as a surprise; she is not, and never will be, a great one for dressing up. But her tired terraced house just might, given the cash she’s said to have made since her appearance on the controversial series (when she joined Celebrity Big Brother some months later, the tabloids suggested she’d received a £100,000 fee). “Yes, it’s not exactly a mansion, is it?” she says, her face crumpling into laughter. So, Dee, where has all the loot gone? Her voice rises indignantly. “It’s all exaggerated, Rachel. You don’t get paid every time you open your mouth, you know. In any case, hand on heart, I don’t need a big house. I’ve put the money in two bank accounts, so it’ll be there for my children if they ever need it.”
The house in question is 10 minutes from James Turner Street, where a team from Love Productions spent 18 months filming residents, the better to show what life on benefits is really like (or something). It belongs to a friend, who offered it to Kelly when things down the road got too much. “Channel 4 just put our addresses out there. I started getting what I call ‘jail mail’: letters [from prisoners] saying ‘you and me could spend the rest of our lives together’. Yes. Eeew. But it was also really scary. All they had to do was write ‘White Dee’ on the envelope: everyone knew where I was.” She pauses. It’s uncomfortable, sometimes, the fact of having to weigh the fury she feels towards Love Productions and Channel 4 against the fact that their not-so-subtle editing has provided her with an income (she hasn’t received welfare since May). “They lied to us,” she says. “They told us the series would be about community spirit, which we had in spades. We didn’t even know what it was going to be called until three weeks before it went out. Only when we watched it did we realise we’d been stitched up. But how can I knock it now?” She spreads her arms to suggest the vast riches that have unaccountably fallen into her lap, a gesture that’s oddly touching in the context of her spartan living room.
Continue reading... Reported by guardian.co.uk 15 hours ago.