So White Dee, how does it feel to be the poster girl for everything that's wrong with Britain? JAN MOIR has a telling encounter with Benefits Street's most infamous and shameless resident

• Everyone wants to talk to Dee, the newly famous matriarch of James Turner Street; undisputed star of Channel 4's controversial series, Benefits Street
• Dee thought the show was 'one-sided', but she will be cashing in on her notoriety by, among other things, making a rap record next week
• But will White Dee yet come to regret taking part in Benefits Street?
  

By Jan Moir for the Daily Mail

Published: 16:48 EST, 21 February 2014 | Updated: 04:26 EST, 22 February 2014

Working class hero? This photograph shows White Dee in his Benefits Street home

Late on a dark and rainy night, it is all go-go-go down at White Dee’s house in Birmingham. There is a pan of fish stew on the stove, her two kids skip about in their pyjamas and in the chaotic front room, the telly is on, with the sound turned down.

In one corner, her new agent Barry Tomes is sifting through offers and texts on his mobile phone, a happy grin on his face. ‘She’s telly gold, she is,’ he says, nodding at Dee.

Meanwhile, her younger sister Siobhan is just leaving, while another friend knocks on the front door, undeterred by the scrawled ‘Meeting In Progress’ sign Dee has taped there in my honour. Can he come back tomorrow, please, she wonders? He plods off, looking glum.

Everyone wants to talk to Dee, the newly famous matriarch of James Turner Street; the undisputed star of Channel 4’s controversial documentary series, Benefits Street. From the moment it was first broadcast last month, Benefits Street has caused its own culture quake across the whole country.

Some residents were shown committing crimes, being feckless, getting drunk. Others appeared to be stuck in the benefits system and sinking fast, with no motivation to improve their situation or circumstances.

Critics of Benefits Street, such as chat show star Paul O’Grady, complained that it was nothing more than poor-bashing poverty porn.

However, Iain Duncan Smith believes that the series more than justifies the changes being made by his Welfare Reform Act. His warning that entire areas of the country have been ghettoised by long-term unemployment was certainly made flesh and blood by the inhabitants of James Turner Street and their antics.

While others argued that the five-part series sympathetically portrayed a section of society who have been forgotten by politicians and condemned to lives bereft of hope or ambition, a large number of viewers had their very worst fears confirmed about benefits scroungers. Dee herself? She thought the show was ‘one-sided.’ 

But next week the 42-year-old single mother will be cashing in on her freshly minted notoriety by, among other things, making a rap record in a Birmingham recording studio. ‘With a well-known but not famous band,’ says Barry, enigmatically.

‘Is it Duran Duran?’ wonders Dee’s elder child, 16-year-old Caitlin. Her seven-year old brother Gerrard — named after Dee’s hero Steven Gerrard, the Liverpool FC star whose poster hangs on the living room wall — thinks this is hilarious.

Meanwhile, despite being a self-styled champion of ‘everyday people’, Dee admits she was only joking when she told Nick Clegg on a radio phone-in that she wanted to become an MP. But there have been plenty of offers coming her way, including one to appear in Big Brother and another to pack groceries in a local supermarket. I think it’s a safe bet to guess which one she’ll go for.

Elsewhere, there are plans for Dee and her enormous bazooms — they became famous after appalled viewers campaigned online to get her to wear a bra — to model plus-size brassieres for a manufacturer based in Tamworth. She is still laughing — sort of — after turning down an offer to model topless.

‘Would I go topless for a million? Ha ha. Maybe if the money was right,’ she says, confusingly.

‘Nobody would see anything, because my boobs are down to my knees,’ she adds, with a raspy smoker’s chuckle. ‘Hmmm,’ Barry wonders. ‘Maybe we should have a think about that, then.’

Topless or not, Dee is the woman who many think sums up everything that is wrong with this country today. With her two children by two different but absent fathers, her fags and her telly, her long-term unemployment (she last worked in 2007) and indolent ways, some see her as the ultimate poster girl for Benefits Britain.

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Dee is the woman who many think sums up everything that is wrong with this country today

‘I can’t work because I am depressed about my mother’s death,’ she says of her mother’s passing two years ago after a long illness. ‘Anyone who doesn’t believe me can see my psyche, my psycho, my whaddyamacall him?’

Psychiatrist? ‘Yes, they can see my psychiatrist.’ To her supporters,  Dee is a folk heroine; a mum who is down on her luck, struggling with mental illness but somehow managing to raise a loving family against the odds.

So, depending on your point of view, White Dee — so called because her mixed-race namesake Black Dee lives a few doors down — is either a disgrace and a lazy benefits scrounger, or a low achiever trapped in a no-hope area through no fault of her own.

‘Roight,’ she says, in her no-nonsense Brummie accent. ‘My total  benefits is £214 a week. Yes, it’s a lot of money. I’m not scrimping and  saving. I don’t always have to buy essential brands.

‘And I know people who work really, really hard and earn less than that, but it’s not my fault how much money I am being given. I don’t ring up David Cameron and say: “Oi, I think you should give me this much.” I don’t set the rates, do I?’

Nevertheless she’d have to earn around £20,000 a year to better the £500-a-month housing benefit and £214-a-week mixture of Child Tax Credit, Employment Support and Child Benefit she currently receives.

Despite the insistent apportioning of blame and fault by media commentators and the public on the programme — the Conservative government are to blame for nearly everything, of course — I think it is fair to say those who took part in Benefits Street, including Dee, have not been entirely thrilled about the results.

White Dee is pictured here at her home on Benefits Street with her agent, Barry Tomes

They now feel they were duped into participating in the show, which was supposed to be about community spirit in adversity — not benefits culture in particular.

In many scenes, Dee’s neighbour Fungi was depicted as a particularly hopeless case; he is a heroin addict whom she is frequently seen trying to help. It was only when Dee saw the programmes herself that she realised he had been lying to her about staying clean and drug-free.

‘He was filmed buying drugs in front of our kids. I was really annoyed with him,’ she says.

She believes C4 has relocated Fungi ‘somewhere in Wales’ because so many neighbours were unhappy with his clandestine antics exposed onscreen.

And since becoming a bit of a celebrity herself, Dee is learning fast that fame comes at a price. Difficult issues from her past have become public, including the fact that she was sacked from her last proper job as an administrator for defrauding her employers Birmingham City Council of £13,000.

Dee — real name Deirdre Kelly — narrowly avoided jail to save Caitlin being put into care. Instead, she carried out 220 hours of unpaid community service working in a charity shop.

Somehow, she manages to turn this crime into a tragedy — with herself as the victim. 

‘I was so ashamed to be caught stealing. I smoked and drank throughout my second pregnancy and nearly killed my son in the womb,’ she says.

‘I drank and drank to block it out. I went into the denial business and didn’t have any medical attention until the night I went into labour. And then his little heart stopped.’

She also reveals that despite more than 1,000 people trying to befriend her on Facebook and hundreds of people turning up at her home ‘for a cuppa and a chat’, not everyone is a fan. 

Last week, someone pelted her front door with eggs. Indeed, during my own visit, there will be another drive-by attack in James Turner Street. We will hear the squeal of brakes, the sound of running feet, then a brick thrown with great force against Dee’s front door. In the tiny living room, it is a shocking moment for all of us.

‘That scared the bloody life out of me. If that was the window, it would have gone straight through my bloody head,’ cries Dee. Her children look on, saucer-eyed,  but silent.

Dee is in her pyjama top and black trousers, her feet in pompom slippers and trainer socks. She sits underneath a triptych of posters of the New York skyline. ‘Hand on heart, I have no idea what those pictures are of,’ she says.

As she admits, her life here may not be lavish, but it is pretty comfortable. Yes, the linoleum is peeling and the mirror needs a dust, but she has her Virgin Media television (she won’t reveal the cost of her monthly package, but it does include Sky sports). 

TV star: Fungi launched an attack on White Dee, who now has a showbiz agent and has appeared on shows including This Morning

She also has her stash of Rolos and Dairy Milk in the fridge alongside her favourite ginger wine and home brew. In the corner of the living room are a mixing desk with CDs and a large speaker.

In the kitchen, there are bottles of vodka and gin left over from a party, next to a sink full of dirty dishes. ‘I don’t drink spirits, they make me cry,’ she says, patting her chest. Her long and beautifully manicured nails are painted with purple glitter.

‘They are my own nails,’ she says, when I admire them. They are the nails of a woman of leisure.
However, this week Dee has been crazy busy! She took part in a Benefits Street debate show on C4 and also turned up on ITV’s This Morning being interviewed by Eamonn Holmes. This prompted one enraged MP to claim that if she was well enough to appear on television, she was well enough to get a job.

‘It doesn’t work like that,’ argues Dee. ‘I’m not always OK. I forgot to take my anti-depression tablets and when I was with Eamonn, the tears were building up, ready to go.’

But she was also upset because ‘I had these beige trainers on, I must have looked a right mess. I didn’t think my feet would be in the shot’.

When she came home from the London TV studios, she went straight to bed. ‘I only did it to give the kids a nice day out,’ she says. ‘It was only two telly shows. It’s not like I was dancing away at a rave with me glow sticks.’

This, I have come to understand, is classic Dee; a plea for sympathy and understanding, quickly followed by some low-grade belligerence masked as humour. She is a funny woman, in every way.

‘I want to work, I do. But some days I just can’t get out of bed. Oh, I wish I had more oomph but I don’t. It is not because I am lazy, it’s not because I can’t be a**ed, it is because I just can’t.’

She has had to get used to the criticism of strangers very quickly. ‘I don’t need anyone else to tell me I am a bad person, I already know that,’ she says. ‘I have got a lot of demons. I self-hate all the time.’

Dee left school at 15 with CSEs in maths, home economics and religion. She did 'officey' work and wanted nothing more

She looks back on her early life as an idyllic time. Her parents emigrated from County Kildare in Ireland in the late Sixties. Her mother did part-time bar  work while her father was a labourer. She and her sister grew up nearby.

‘Our world was just perfect. It was very old school — we had a mum and a dad. Cooked dinners on the table. We had a tin bath, but we never considered ourselves poor.’

Dee left school at 15 with CSEs in maths, home economics and religion. She did ‘officey’ work and wanted nothing more. ‘I had no big dreams. I never wanted to be a doctor or anything.’

At 18, she fell ‘head over heels’ with Caitlin’s father, who had a job that was something ‘warehousey’. He left three years after his daughter was born and Dee had to use the Child Support Agency to get him to pay for Caitlin: she currently receives ‘around £12 a week’ from him.

It has been a matter of upset to the family that, following the Benefits Street hullabaloo, he gave an interview saying that he had regular contact with his daughter.

‘She hasn’t seen him for 13 years. She tried to friend him on Facebook, but he blocked her.’

Nor does Gerrard see his father much: he and Dee were never in a relationship as such but just friends when she fell pregnant with their son. He helps out financially ‘as and when’ he can.

What does she hope for the future, apart from a career as a rock star? ‘The ideal solution for me would be to have me mum back. It is just two years ago, me mum, it is still very raw,’ she says.

‘I still have few dreams. I don’t dream about being slim because I don’t care about being slim. My dream would be to have two perfectly happy children who were proud of me.’

She has a tattoo of a devil on her chest, one that commemorates her mother on her arm, You’ll Never Walk Alone on her foot and two praying hands on her back. She never, ever worries about having her benefits taken away from her.

‘If it happens, it happens,’ she shrugs, although perhaps her insouciance is rooted in the sure knowledge that in this country, it is never going to happen.

Anyway, people now seek out her opinions and her company, she has a burgeoning career as the unlikeliest reality TV show celebrity ever, and for the first time in her life, she appears to have something approaching  a future.

Yet I wonder. Will White Dee yet come to regret taking part in Benefits Street? ‘I never have regrets, what a waste of time,’ she says.

Nevertheless, I leave Benefits Street with the sound of a crashing brick hitting a flimsy door ringing in my ears.

White Dee may indeed be telly gold, but one wonders what  the weeks and months to come  will bring.

I wonder. Will White Dee yet come to regret taking part in Benefits Street? 'I never have regrets, what a waste of time,' she says

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