Cathy Come Home (played by Carol White) and Reg (Ray Brooks), and their descent into poverty and homelessness. At the start of the film, Cathy leaves her parents' overcrowded rural home and hitchhikes to the city, where she finds work and meets Reg, a well-paid lorry driver. They fall in love, marry, and rent a modern flat in a building that does not allow children. Cathy soon becomes pregnant and must stop working, and Reg is injured on the job and becomes unemployed. The loss of income and birth of the baby force them to leave their flat, and they are unable to
Media in Birmingham was "Cathy Come Home", described by the BBC itself as "the most famous and groundbreaking TV drama ever made", and judged the second greatest British television programme of the twentieth century in a 2000 survey of broadcast industry professionals by the British Film Institute. First broadcast in 1966 and largely a Birmingham production, it was produced by Balsall Heath-born Tony Garnett, directed by Nuneaton-born Ken Loach, and was the first example of the hard-hitting, high-brow television drama that was to feature strongly in Birmingham's broadcast output over the following decades. Birmingham and the West Midlands was one of the first