Broken

By Jim Kenworth & Sarah Ward

A Continuous Drama Series Pilot

BROKEN deals with one of the most hated and despised group of people in society – social workers!

BROKEN focuses on a highly pressurised, under-resourced and often maligned Children’s Social Work Team. We explore the relationships within the Team, and with the often volatile and dangerous relationships of people in the wider community who need their support.

BROKEN shows social workers at work and at home, and gives an insight into their humanity, their insecurities, their dilemmas, and their own dysfunctional and difficult lives. We see how they care passionately about their clients and never want to give up on them, and we also see how sometimes they can’t stand their clients and want to get rid of them. We see how they make mistakes, and we see how they get it right, but it’s always a knife-edge, because social work is about people and people are unpredictable.

BROKEN invites viewers to forget what they think they know about social workers: Senior Team Manager Pete Richards, bluff, no nonsense, foul-mouthed, defiantly un-PC; Lil, a dedicated social worker by day, a hardcore clubber by night; Joe Powell, Team Clerk, right-wing, lazy and occasional drug-dealer. BROKEN’S social workers are the real thing: complex, varied and definitely not always the right on, PC do-gooders usually depicted in The Bill and Eastenders!

BROKEN tackles knife-edge storylines including abuse, domestic violence, adoption and fostering, drugs and alcohol. There will of course be successes for the Team as well as the darker moments; a young person leaving care for the first time starts to turn their life round and finally makes it; a mother with learning difficulties manages to keep her baby with the support of her social worker, and the commitment of her own parents.

With David Cameron talking about mending Britain’s “broken society” and mounting concern about the magnitude of inequality across the country, BROKEN will be a topical, controversial, heart- stopping and intense TV drama series.

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