YP Comment: TV entertainment or voyeurism?
A chilling story about how nine-year-old Shannon, and a local community, was betrayed by the youngster’s heartless mother Karen in 2008, it’s also a gritty story of how residents of the maligned Dewsbury Moor estate pulled together despite their benefit-dependent lifestyles being besmirched by many, including a youthful David Cameron who said it was symptomatic of ‘broken Britain’ and those areas “where decency fights a losing battle against degradation and despair”.
Ahead of the concluding episode charting the estate’s reaction to Shannon’s discovery and the wider deception, it’s indicative of this shocking story’s lingering legacy nine years on that public opinion is so divided about whether this was public service entertainment or gratuitous voyeurism.