Today poverty and unemployment are living realities for hundreds of thousands of people. In two imaginative and challenging films, A Life without Work, the BBC considered a ground-breaking investigation into the lives of people trapped in poverty and without work in the early twentieth century. They addressed a fundamental question: How much has really changed?

The films were based on a fascinating project, conducted in 1910, which investigated poverty and deprivation in a section of the community in York. It was the brainchild of a remarkable Quaker, Seebohm Rowntree.

Wealthy and privileged, he was prompted by his faith to consider the social problems of his time and, in 1900, produced an initial survey of life in the town. It revealed that a quarter of the population were living in poverty. The fact that this was happening in a relatively wealthy town such as York made his revelations particularly shocking.

He wrote: ‘You cannot live in a town like York with its poverty, its intemperance and its vice, without a sense of responsibility being, from time to time, born in upon you.’ He acted. In 1910 Rowntree decided to record first hand accounts of the poor in York. These reports gave ‘voice to the voiceless’ and were, eventually, to prove hugely influential in a story that culminated in the establishment of the welfare state.

The success of the first programme was the way in which it imaginatively echoed a popular television concept, Who Do You Think You Are? In this programme well-known people delve in to their family tree. In the first programme of A Life without Work, the programme makers decided to track down one of the families involved in the 1910 survey. They chose to go not from the present to the past, but from the past to the present.

The ‘Nevinson’ family were a ‘sober, decent family’ who had taken part in the Rowntree project. The details of their everyday life, their endless meals of ‘tea, bread and margarine’, conscientiously recorded for the Rowntree project in a diary, brought poverty and terms such as ‘a national disgrace’ to life.

The programme, presented by Richard Bilton, was extremely well-crafted, with an intelligent use of archive and contributors. Dramatic reconstructions were used as a visual device to illustrate readings, an interesting series of locations were explored, including Bootham School in York and an archaeological dig and some imaginative use of archive material employed. Central to the film was the remarkable figure of Seebohm Rowntree. He was revealed to be a man of enormous moral quality, social concern and political vision and films are a powerful tribute to an extraordinary Quaker.

In researching and uncovering the family’s history since 1910, the programme was able to mix elements of a ‘detective story’ with insights into the social and economic changes of the twentieth century. The impact these changes had on an individual family became the narrative thread of a fascinating programme and one that resolved with an amazing twist: a descendent of the family, caught at the time in what Seebohm Rowntree described as ‘a social evil appalling in its magnitude’, was revealed to be a famous actor who had made his breakthrough on a film dealing with… unemployment in Yorkshire. However, I am not sure how many Quakers will have seen The Full Monty.