Hayley Taylor: 'I've felt what the unemployed feel: losing confidence, staring at four walls'

The star of the new reality TV show The Fairy Jobmother on getting the long-term unemployed back to work
Hayley Taylor.
Hayley Taylor. Photograph: David Levene

It used to be the case that when something mattered to society we measured it – and so audits and targets and league tables all became contemporary signifiers of importance. Latterly, however, if something really matters to us, we turn it into a reality television show. Over the last decade, pretty much all of our longings have been reworked as hit TV formats – how to cure your two-year-old's tantrums, tart up your house, find your perfect partner – so it was probably inevitable that the recession would inspire its own age of austerity star. Step forward, then, Hayley Taylor – Channel 4's new Fairy Jobmother.

The Fairy Jobmother, starting tomorrow evening, is essentially Supernanny for the unemployed. In each episode, the 43-year-old Yorkshirewoman moves in with a family of long-term benefit claimants, observes the habits of the household, then produces a plan of action. From ordering a young man to fix his front tooth ("Sorry, but you look like a thug") to teaching interview technique ("No! Not 'Hiya'! You've got to say 'Hello'"), Taylor tackles every obstacle on the journey out of joblessness, undeterred by the mandatory tears and rage of the participants' "narrative arc".

Viewers of last year's C4 documentary series, Benefit Busters, about the welfare-to-work agency, A4E, will recognise Taylor from its Doncaster office, where she used to work with jobless lone parents. Taylor was instant TV gold – "wonderful, and appalling", marvelled one critic, while others drew comparisons with Little Britain's comic creation Marjorie, the larger-than-life bully in charge of a weight-loss club. She was still working for A4E until only a month ago, and when we meet she has the slightly giddy bewilderment of someone in transit from real life to the unfamiliar terrain of celebrity. "I'm like, 'Oh my God, it's t'Guardian, int it!?'"

In person she's just as brassy and blunt as on screen, but also occasionally misty-eyed, her register lurching from the tremulous empathy of a problem page – "I know how it feels, I can relate, I do know how it feels" – to Apprentice-style positivity mantras – "In order to make your life better you've got to take control of your situation and yourself, and take a look at what you can do!" – punctuated by the semi-intentional humour of a rather camp, northern comedy club compere.

Garrulous, hilarious, prone to malapropism, with a weakness for anecdotes told in the first, third and second person ("I said OK, in for a penny in for a pound, so she barges upstairs to a room full of 16-year-old school leavers who were just, oh my God, an absolute nightmare! Right, Hayley, get a grip of yourself"), Taylor is certainly a character. But barring an economic miracle, she is also about to become the nation's popular authority on how to tackle our soaring welfare bill.

Hayley Taylor in The Fairy Jobmother. Hayley Taylor in The Fairy Jobmother. Photograph: Contract Number (Programme)

Every side of the benefits debate will be hoping for proof from The Fairy Jobmother that claimants are feckless/heroic/over-indulged/underpaid – delete according to prejudice. The cartoonish convention of most hit reality TV certainly lends itself to oversimplification, and the show has already been sold to the US. But The Fairy Jobmother is unusually subtle, and utterly compelling – each episode changed my mind about the benefits system at least a dozen times, while one even moved me to tears. And Taylor herself turns out to be altogether more complex and nuanced than you might expect.

What did she discover, I ask, from living with the unemployed, that she hadn't already known from working at A4E? "The fear," she says quickly, with feeling. "The absolute, absolute fear they feel, of even trying to venture out, to even believe – fear, it's just fear. It's written all over their faces, that absolutely terrified look." Everyone knows that people on welfare are afraid to take a job in case it doesn't work and they have to wait for six weeks before their benefits resume.

But the greater fear gripping them, Taylor says, is more profound than anything a tweak to the system could resolve – and almost always rooted in the psychodynamics of the family. Tips on interview technique are all very well, "But in order to go forward, you have to go back; if you can't identify what's gone wrong, and why it went wrong, you have no way of moving forward and making a change in yourself."

She cheerfully admits to being unqualified as a family therapist, but displays an uncanny instinct on the show for emotional undercurrents, tracing confidence crises back to bereavements, missing fathers and so on. One family conforms more or less exactly to the classic feckless welfare stereotype – chain-smoking domestic chaos, tattooed indignation at the very idea of working for the minimum wage – but Taylor refers the mother to counselling, and takes her shy son to a boxing club.

Some viewers, I suggest, will feel that that family has already had quite enough indulgence at others' expense. Why doesn't she explain to them that welfare isn't a lifestyle choice, and that even if a job wouldn't make them better off, they have a civic duty to take what they can get? "Cos that's putting views in that maybe they don't agree with," she says simply. She does explain to claimants that their benefits are paid for by other people paying tax – "And they're always shocked. Total shock. They just saw it as free money. They didn't know what national insurance is, they had no concept.

"But I'm not going to sit there and guilt-trip them, because that would only make them feel bad about themselves, and that only makes the situation worse. How would anyone ever trust me if I took that black-and-white view? I'm there to point out the pros of working, not just financially, but emotionally and socially. Who am I to say to them, 'Yeah, but I'm paying for you?' I can't do that." She looks genuinely offended.

That's what a lot of people watching will be saying, I point out, when they see the flatscreen TVs, family dogs and PlayStations. "Well, we can all sit back and go: I'm paying my taxes, I'm paying for you, blah blah blah, but does anyone know the real reasons behind all that, and understand their situation, and why it's so difficult to move on, and why they feel trapped, and why they feel so low, and why they're so terrified? In 48 minutes, as a viewer, maybe you're not going to see all that. But in three weeks with each family, I saw that. I see people in desperate situations. I wouldn't want someone to judge me if I was in that situation. So why would I be angry with them? I know how they feel."

Without empathy, Taylor insists, nothing works. The relief on every family's face is certainly palpable when they first meet her. "I thought she'd be a posh bitch" one subject admits – and it's hard to see how she'd get very far if she was. But isn't her claim to share their pain a little disingenuous? Born in Wakefield, Taylor may be a down-to-earth working-class northerner, but she went straight to college from school, trained as a hairdresser, became a successful stylist, was promoted to training apprentice stylists, and later ran a charity, before becoming a highflyer at A4E. She has never been sacked or made redundant, never claimed benefits or even applied for a job she didn't get – and now she's about to be famous. How can she plausibly claim to know how they feel?

"Because what I've had, in the middle of my career," she says quickly, "is seven years staying at home raising my daughter, talking to a child and facing four walls every single day. My husband lost his job, we were struggling financially, he had to take a low-wage job and worked so hard I hardly saw him. And that seven years knocked me a lot. Because I lost faith in who I was, and my ability to go out there and contribute anything.

"It's not about whether I've claimed benefit or not. It isn't the benefit; it's the feeling. And I had every feeling that they've had. Losing confidence, losing self-esteem, staring at four walls. It's about everything else."

How, then, can she explain the paradox apparent in every one of the families she tries to help? Taylor says they're crippled by lack of confidence, unable to believe themselves capable of making any contribution to society – and frankly you'd have to be blind, or to the right of John Redwood, not to see that. When a participant breaks down in tears, it's invariably a compliment – never a criticism – that overcomes them. "Because they're used to being told they're crap," Taylor agrees. Yet when she suggests they apply for a minimum-wage entry-level position, the same people look positively insulted.

"Oh, God," she exclaims, "I know. And it's very, very difficult to deal with. People have an unrealistic view of themselves. I think a lot of people think they are capable of achieving far more than what they can. Everyone wants a quick fix; everybody wants to be on £12 an hour."

Frustratingly, Taylor doesn't seem remotely interested in unravelling this contradiction. "There are different people who have different feelings," she says vaguely. "You can't say an unemployed person's like this or like that, nothing's generic." The solution, on the other hand, she insists is universal: "The one common denominator is for everyone to be realistic about what their qualities are. Don't sit there waiting for the £12-an-hour job. Aim towards what you know you can achieve, take a job at £5.80 an hour, and get back into the working environment."

Taylor is pretty brutal when it comes to hammering this message home. And it's incredibly moving to witness what a low-wage job really does mean to these families, when they finally land one. The celebrations make them look like X Factor winners. But for all her compassion, and for her care which takes them there, I'm unconvinced by Taylor's evangelical conviction that the only thing stopping anyone from working is their attitude, and that positive thinking can solve everything.

Barbara Ehrenreich's book, Switch and Bait, encountered precisely this belief among American jobseekers, who had internalised their own unemployment as a symptom of their failure to think positively – rather than recognised it as the result of economic circumstances beyond their control. If the jobs don't exist, I say to Taylor, it doesn't really matter what's in my head, does it? The jobs still don't exist.

"So why can't you create the jobs?" she flashes back. "You feel good about yourself, and you have self-belief, and you have total courage of your convictions, and you think I can go out there and do anything I want. So then you have the most fantastic idea, you go out there on a self-employed course, create your own job, and maybe create jobs for other people."

Really? We're talking about people who've never worked, from families who've never worked – and now she wants them to be Richard Branson? That doesn't sound like realism to me.

"OK," she argues, "What's unrealistic about getting up, going to a workplace, asking to speak to the manager, saying, 'You know what, I might not have enough skills to work here, but I really want to work here, how about I come and work for you and prove myself to you for as long as it takes, while I'm receiving benefits; I'll work for you for no pay to prove myself until you want to take me on?" By now she is almost shouting, thumping the table. "That's what I did! I went and volunteered for a charity, and then the charity took me on!"

Every time I think I've understood where Taylor lies in the ideological battle over benefits, she surprises me. One minute she was all therapy and compassion; now she's giving Norman Tebbit a run for his money. Would she make voluntary work compulsory for people on benefits then? "How will everyone care for the kids if it's compulsory? It's not realistic, is it?" Would she cut a claimant's benefits if they refused to take a job? "No, because people have to have money coming in. Life has to be liveable." Teenage girls definitely do get pregnant to get a council flat, she says. "That's true, 100%. But what are we going to do about that; have homeless babies?" Immigrants, she says, work harder than many Britons "because their family wouldn't survive if they couldn't send money back" – but when I suggest that by that logic, perhaps we should abolish the welfare state here, she looks at me as if I'm mad. "But there aren't enough jobs for the two million people out of work!" And round and round we go.

All my efforts to organise Taylor's thoughts into a coherent position only seem to make her more exasperated. When I ask what she would do if the Department of Work and Pensions put her in charge of benefits, she gasps in alarm: "Oh my God, I have absolutely no bloody idea! I'm from the groundroots, me."

Her position, I finally grasp, is in fact entirely coherent – far more so than my vain attempts to pin her down. If The Fairy Jobmother has a political message, it is this: the welfare state is intractably complicated, and pragmatic confusion the only tenable response. For once, reality television appears to have come close to the truth.

"You see, everybody has their point of view, right? If I could tell you the solution I'd be out there now. If you've got the solution then bring it on and make it right – for all the people out there who can't even face getting up in the morning. But we've got to deal with these grey areas, whether we want to or not. Nothing is clear-cut; nothing at all. And you can only deal with what you've got, can't you? Nothing is black and white."

The first episode of The Fairy Jobmother is tomorrow at 9pm on Channel 4.

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