Despite her vivid recollection of the day the authorities stepped in – “I remember picking up my brother and holding him. She has only recently moved back to the area and begun to get to know them, having been removed from their care at the age of five.

But it ought to still be shocking when Kelly conducts a tour of her kitchen cupboard, its shelves offering a few quarter-full bags of old pasta and a tub of gravy granules, picked up at a food bank, that have gone out of date for want of something to put them on: “There’s days when I don’t eat fucking anything.” In those bleak years when she and her son were apart, Kelly would go without food or heat in order to pay rent, knowing that if she lost her home, Xorin would be lost for good.Įlsewhere in the city, the opening episode’s other case study is 19-year-old Annabelle, who is visiting her parents. The effect of poverty, either enervating or enraging people forced to live severely limited lives, isn’t over-emphasised in Kids, perhaps because in 2023 it can be taken as read. When the social worker’s gone, Kelly tearfully recalls trying to parent her children on her own while working, without enough time or money – and with nobody to help. But Wivell – who questions his subjects with a startling lack of the normal film-maker formality, having evidently won their trust – sees past her bullish exterior. Much of British society would look briefly at Kelly’s past behaviour and dismiss her. Asked to rate her own parenting, Kelly awards herself a series of nines and tens. “Who the fuck are you then, girl?” she cheerfully asks a young woman from CCS who has perched, a little gingerly, on the sofa, clipboard on knee. Now he’s back on a trial basis and, when we initially encounter Kelly, she seems maddeningly complacent. An argument at home had ended with Kelly slapping him, and a gang had corralled him into dealing crack and heroin. Three years ago, Xorin was moved by CCS from Kelly’s house in Coventry to a residential children’s home in south Wales, for his own safety. In a programme that finds some despair and a lot more hope in how errant parents are given second chances, what Kelly is saying is: she’s getting it right this time. ‘B efore, if Xorin had killed someone, I’d’ve said: ‘Right, I’m gonna grass you up.’ Now, it’s like: ‘Mate, I’ll help you bury the body.’ That’s how close we’ve become.” Xorin is 17 and his potential partner in crime is Kelly, his mother – the first teen/parent pair we meet in Kids, Paddy Wivell’s three-part documentary utilising unprecedented access to the work of Coventry children’s services.

The life we bury series