They’ve been called the “unluckiest generation” – unable to get on the housing ladder, saddled with student debt, and hit hardest by government cuts. Now a new Channel 4 drama aims to put Millennials under the spotlight, capturing this generation’s rootless insecurity in the same way 1990s hit This Life depicted the lives and loves, fears and failures of those who came of age at the dawn of New Labour.
Not Safe for Work, written by award-winning playwright DC Moore and staring Zawe Ashton, is both a scathingly funny look at twentysomething life in the 21st century and a love letter to a generation left treading water by a perfect storm of job shortages and rising rent.
“We’re something of a jilted generation and I wanted to tackle that,” said Moore, himself 35. It took a trip to the Northampton suburb where he grew up for the idea to crystalise. “I have a lot of friends who work in the civil service and found themselves really hit hard by the government cuts. I thought it would be interesting to tell a personal story that was also tied to the political because our lives are defined by those bigger political moments.”
Not Safe for Work, while filled with sharp one-liners and amusing set pieces, is a much bleaker story than This Life. Miles, Anna and friends could afford to daydream about football and people they fancied because, as trainee lawyers on secure career tracks, life was good. Even conflicted Egg seemed to easily find a new career when he fancied one.
Similarly, Peep Show’s Jeremy Usborne and Mark Corrigan, befuddled spokesmen for a slightly later generation, might have drifted from job to job, or had largely futile dreams of climbing the rungs of middle management’s rung, but their world is a largely benign place where marriage is a possibility and some employment achievable.
Not Safe for Work, by contrast, features people who are struggling to hold it together. From Ashton’s efficient civil servant, Katherine, who uses her frosty manner to hide how broken she is inside, to the permanently smiling Jenny (Peaky Blinders’ Sophie Rundle), whose cheerfulness is almost a form of mania.
“I really do feel as though everyone born after 1979 got a much, much rougher deal,” said Moore. “Not Safe for Work is really about someone who feels that their life is over before it had a chance to begin. If you look at the statistics the average first-time-buyer is now over 36. That’s crazy.
“We’re constantly told that you should get a partner, have a kid, buy a house, and that defines how you live your life but what if you can’t do any of that? People who work in the private sector are completely loaded and on the fast track. They have their kids quicker. They buy houses earlier. Most people I know can’t do that.”
Moore was also interested in looking at what happens when a generation finds itself unable to grow up. He wanted to address the realities of a generation that lives in a time of “quite extraordinary excess”.
“It’s almost as though we know we’re fucked in the long-term so we should be grateful for where we find pleasure. It feels like a very weird party that’s OK for the minute but won’t last.
“It’s fine when you’re partying like that at 23 and still sorted at 25 but around 30 a few cracks can be seen and by 32 or 33 things are really starting to fracture and what used to seem fun now seems less so.”
This elegy to struggling lives could be near-impossible to watch, but Moore undercuts the bleakness with wit and dark humour ensuring audiences are likely to laugh more than sigh.
“I feel as though a whole generation is being done over and now the Tories are already talking about making the cuts more aggressive so it isn’t going to go away,” he said. “But at the same time there’s humour to be found in the bleakest moments. That’s what this show is about.”
Not Safe for Work, from Tuesday 30 June, 10pm, Channel 4.
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