Lollipop (2024), directed and written by Daisy-May Hudson.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002pvjy/lollipop

Wikipedia

Lollipop is a film with a simple enough plot. Molly Brown (Posy Sterling) is a recently paroled mother. She wants to get her kids back before she does anything else, which is heart-warming. A familiar fix for the 60%-70% of the 3500 women imprisoned in England and having children under 12, mostly serving sentences of less than 12 months.  

Unless you’ve got money, are comfortably middle-class, it’s a hard place between a place of safety for Molly’s children and having no home. ‘You pay other people to take care of my kids...’ and you won’t help me is Molly’s battle cry.

Precariat makes poverty sound like a lifestyle choice.   A Kindness of Strangers (2019) sits among the British/Irish social‑realist tradition of Rosie, Lollipop, and grandmother of this genre A Taste of Honey. Almost character studies in which a lack of housing and structural neglect is played out in attractive young mothers’ lives.

In the 1960s, when A Taste of Honey was made, there was a belief that in time these things would be fixed. Certainly in the late 1970s when I read Poverty in the UK, I was shocked, but not appalled, for the same reason and I was considered working class and in need of help myself.

Molly’s struggle against a bureaucratic behemoth is more unforgiving. She naively expects support. All she gets is slapped down. Her lifestyle choices flung back at her.  

‘You voluntarily gave up your home.’

In other words, she was nicked and sent to prison.

She refuses a one-bedroom because she has two children. So what, we might think. Bunkbeds. I know a family of sixteen and their mum and dad lived in two small rooms and a kitchen.

But if she accepts a one-bedroom, which in London, will be the size of a pigeon coop, then she can’t get her kids. Because they need a bedroom each before the social services can release them into her care.

Housing in London, New York and Dublin, the astronomical costs for working-class mothers is where real lives goes down the sinkhole. Big cities are full of people that don’t care and houses that aren’t there.

But for every Molly Brown there’s an Amina (Idil Ahmed). A fellow traveller. There to keep her head afloat. She too has her familiar story. Together they are a team,  set to take on an unfair world.

We know who’ll win through. And we want them to.

In reality, the exception to the rule reinforces the rule that if you try hard enough, you too will make it. A poor people problem, which it is, but it’s called Poverty in the UK, which never went away. No longer regarded as a structural problem that needs fixing and is becoming unworkable. A Taste of Honey is long gone which leaves a sour taste and a chocking sound.  

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CVBVVGD6