When we see child welfare services on TV, it is usually in parables of Victorian squalor and modern blame-seeking: the middle-class social worker whose fear of appearing judgemental leads to a fatally wrong move, the cynical senior management arse-coverer, the lost child in the photograph identified only by an initial. We only ever hear about it when it’s awful. So a children’s social services department is, you would guess, the least promising premise for a work of comedy since Chris Morris decided to investigate the humdrum lives of everyday suicide-bombing folk. Where’s the humour in this waiting room of human misery? And if there is any, should we sensitive, bien-pensant liberals really be laughing at it?
Channel 4’s social work sitcom Damned manages to flip these apparent turn-offs into a clever ensemble comedy that locates fresh reserves of black humour in what the caring professions refer to as “chaotic lives”. In its bleakly funny way, it might provoke you to anger that we have allowed our social safety net to become so threadbare, and left it with so many clients, too.
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