The Wethouse (2000)

Waiting to die.

There's a tender moment near the end of The Wethouse that stands in contrast to almost everything else in this hour-long film on terminal addiction. Jamie 'Blue' is saying her goodbyes to 'Belfast' Tommy as she prepares to leave Providence Row – the Bethnal Green hostel that takes drunks off the street and gives them room, board, and a licence to keep drinking.

As Jamie jerks through the large common room she stops at Tommy and the two residents lock in loving embrace. They don't know it, but this will be the last time they see each other alive.

The Wethouse – part of Channel 4's Cutting Edge remit – was filmed over five consecutive days in early 2000, and came about almost by accident. Film-maker Penny Woolcock had intended to document street-drinking, but stumbled upon the Bethnal Green hostel by chance. Then came the small matter of securing filming privileges, as well as gaining informed consent from residents affected by near-permanent drunkenness.

Living Wake

After protracted negotiations, the team was finally allowed inside to film. What they captured is a grim record of late-stage addiction, where every subject hovers close to death.

The majority of footage centres on the large common room. This is the focal point, the drinking hub where residents congregate by day. Here they laugh, sing, fight, bicker, and dance in a living wake, all powered by frequent sups from cans of premium-strength lager – de rigueur thanks to its favourable price-per-unit ratio. This motley assortment is comprised of middle-aged men, with a couple of exceptions. They are mostly toothless, thanks to repeated falls. Their faces are pock-marked and dented into veiny misshape, owing to a combination of career alcoholism and extended periods on the streets.

Their motor skills are so blunted that the film takes on a stop-motion effect. Staccato shuffles are the norm, as are farcical attempts to locate doors. The residents are responsible for getting their own alcohol, and some insure against ever running out by continuing an informal banking system carried over from their days spent together on the street.

If the residents are serious about alcohol, then they take a more relaxed approach to personal hygiene. Penny recalls how her assistant Rachel found the stench of urine and constant dribbling 'really, really difficult' to deal with initially. It was so bad they could 'clear a crowded tube' after a day's filming.

Staff

The hostel staff are quite hands-off. They stay back from pockets of drunken quarrels and slow-motion skirmishes inevitable in a room full of wasted patrons, well-used to the daily routine of such an operation. They perform cursory bedroom checks and encourage residents to eat some food, and then appear later to scoop bits of broken plate and splattered dinner off the floor.

The on-site doctor has a similar laissez-faire attitude. He's keen to see residents early in the morning, as come afternoon they're too drunk for meaningful dialogue. He explains the absurdity of both knowing the root cause of residents' issues and his powerlessness to help. So when residents do wobble ‘round his door with their respective complaints (psoriasis, bruising etc.) the doctor offers his professional opinion, but only as a sop to convention.

Penny likens Providence Row to a 'hospice for drunks'. Despite its commitment to sending any resident who wants to get sober for treatment, the hostel acknowledges its chief role: to provide shelter to formerly homeless drunks fastened to the end-goal of drinking themselves to death.

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We learn about residents' pasts inside their private bedrooms, away from the theatrics of the common room. Residents like Michael Chandler, who's haunted by a murderous misstep while on UN peacekeeping duties in the Congo. He can't shake the guilt of killing an innocent man, and his pain pushes through wheezy pauses and chesty sniffles as he recalls the event.

Michael also shows us his charred fingers, a permanent reminder of the time he was set on fire in a derelict building for the crime of not having any spare alcohol. Michael's recourse to drinking as a means of blocking out his past is a recurring theme among residents.

Then there's Annette. We meet Annette—one of only two women featured in the program—early on. She's thirty-something-but-looks-older. She has short hair and wears a wide, toothless smile, and is being escorted to her bedroom because she's paralytically drunk.

Like most, Annette's descent into homelessness and addiction is brought on by an impoverished childhood. She was beaten and raped and drinks to forget. Throughout the course of filming she does a surprising 180, and so we follow her out of the hostel and into the clinic on her first steps to sobriety. Penny put on an extra day's filming to include this footage, hopeful as she was about Annette's recovery.

'Annette, who seemed to be in a good place towards the end of filming,’ says Penny, ‘relapsed and died.'

'You never know when you make things. It's not my intention […] to harm anybody and I had specifically gone back to see her because she was in such good shape and I thought that (the film) would encourage her [to keep going].'

I put it to Penny—mainly rhetorically—that there's a perverse self-sabotage at play here; instead of Annette's resolve to remain sober getting stronger by watching herself back on film, it has the opposite effect. Whatever the psychology, it's clear that Annette's death still haunts Penny almost twenty years later.

Jamie

As does Jamie's situation. Jamie is the only resident in The Wethouse not addicted to alcohol. Instead, Jamie is half-deaf, semi-coherent, and permanently twitchy because of chronic glue sniffing.

Like Annette, Jamie is probably thirty-something. But unlike Annette, Jamie appears almost toddler-like thanks to jerky ambulation and a baby-faced innocence. As such, she's fussed over by the hostel's men who light up when she's around.

Coincidentally, Penny recalls a vague acquaintanceship with Jamie years before filming. Back then she was a straight-talking, tall-walking member of a women's collective, qualities long-since robbed by glue.

'The whole idea of her moving into a flat was mad from the beginning,’ says Penny, ‘and I'm sorry to say that that [...] played out.'

'She wanted to move, but she wasn't really capable of making those kinds of decisions for herself. She was barely able to feed herself.'

Penny kept in touch with Jamie for several years, driven by a duty of care to those featured in her films. She talked with her on the phone, and recalls having to shout quite loudly because of Jamie's progression into complete deafness.

Penny also visited Jamie at her flat on a few occasions. She paints me a hellish picture of living conditions so bad as to be a 'literal shithole', which causes friction between Jamie and her carers, compounding everyone's misery.

Penny tells me a few troubling off-record anecdotes, and recalls the interminable decline of Jamie’s mental state as the years went by. Eventually, Penny lost contact with Jamie and is unable to say where she is, or if she's even still alive.

'I don't feel good about the end of that,' she says.

An Irishman, A Northern Irishman, and a Scotsman

There's an overrepresentation of (northern)Irish and Scottish men in The Wethouse. Men who've journeyed away from native lands to end up destitute in a London hostel.

Men like ‘Belfast’ Tommy. Men like Sean 'The Big One', who turns yellow and dies during filming. Rob and Billy, pulled south from Scotland at an indeterminate point, now find themselves singing about the UDA — mindlessly drunk, oblivious to whether their off-key strains might cause offence.

At any rate, we're told that alcohol bridges ideological divides. The fact that Billy rescued Michael Chandler when he was set on fire is testament to that, sectarian singing notwithstanding.

Some of these men served in the army. They developed a taste for alcohol on duty, but had the barrier of a military routine to keep addiction at bay. Once that went, however, these men drifted out onto the streets where they were now free to drink as much as they liked — a cause they rallied to with gusto.

All of these men died shortly after filming.

Penny for her Thoughts

What makes The Wethouse a great film on addiction? The lack of narrative prodding? The in-your-face brutality of what substance abuse can do to a person? The grim roll of remembrance during the end credits, where we learn that almost everyone featured is now dead?

How does Penny feel about the film, twenty years on?

'It's one of my favourite things I've made,' she says. 'I go into things hoping to come out of it different, […] transformed.'

If fear lies in the unfamiliar, then Penny's exposure to terminal addiction dissolved her long-standing fears about street drunks. She tells me how quickly she got used to the urine. How she relished going back each day for filming. How she 'never felt threatened', and quickly came to understand these people posed no danger to anyone but themselves; people who had simply 'crossed a line' with their drinking, and were just 'waiting to die’.

'There was a real sweetness there,' she says, in spite of this grim inevitability running throughout the film.

Penny also touches on the alchemy one hopes for when they embark on creative pursuits. That magic process by which all the ingredients come together to help artists 'express things as well as you possibly can’. This alchemy, Penny reports, was present in The Wethouse.

'I'm not saying I understood everything,' she says. 'But that was the experience I had with those people, at that time, in that place.'