Dickens wrote fiction based on reality. He changed people's ideas on poverty, gave an insight into prisons and workhouses.
Strange how people are still saying it's just fiction.
Many of the actors in I, Daniel Blake were real people, not actors and Loach interviewed many jobcentre staff, many of whom had left because they did not like what they were being asked to do.
"Loach cites testimonies he and the screenwriter Paul Laverty took from current and former jobcentre employees. He said: “Many of [them] walked away from the jobcentre because they were disgusted by what they were being asked to do. They left because they didn’t want to be part of something they believed to be wrong. Steve [McCall] has obviously chosen to stay.”
The jobcentre and Department for Work and Pensions employees Loach refers to are thanked in the film’s closing credits but were too scared to be named individually for fear of retribution, Loach said.
“They told us that jobcentre employees understood they were working in a bureaucratic trap that had been built with the intention of catching people out,” he said. “They told us that people working at the jobcentre were given targets when it came to how many people they were expected to sanction. There is no doubt in my mind that, if a random cross-section of people went to the jobcentre every day, did everything they were asked to do, dotted every ‘i’ and crossed every ‘t’, some of them would still be sanctioned.”
Loach is backed up by Amanda Payne, who worked at the same Newcastle branch in a number of positions, including as work search assessor and hardship allowance officer, before leaving in 2015. She was cast in a small role in I, Daniel Blake."
Great examples.