Channel 4’s Handcuffed shows the stark realities of homelessness can move anyone, even millionaires

Your mileage may vary on whether Channel 4’s Handcuffed is a game show or social experiment, but the world-altering moment that saw a millionaire confronted with homelessness was a tear-jerker.

The Jonathan Ross-fronted show sees opposites handcuffed to each other to see how long they’ll last. So the Green Party councillor is cuffed to the Reform-voting influencer, the feminist is locked in with the manosphere-loving gym addict and so on.

But it’s Suffolk multi-millionaire Anthony and three-jobs-juggling Londoner Tilly where the show moves from curio to genuinely insightful social commentary.

Spoilers for Handcuffed episode three.

Anthony started the series picking up Tilly in his classic Rolls Royce – one of many in his estimated £4 million car collection – and whisking her off to his Suffolk home where the maid serves up Pimm’s on demand.

But by the time the pair are at Tilly’s family home in Enfield, the pair are starting to get on each others’ nerves.

Tilly, who works as a barmaid and a cleaner, opts to take Anthony out on outreach to take sausage and mash meals to people who are homeless on the streets.

She has been volunteering to run charity Little Things UK over the last decade, supporting people experiencing homelessness.

Anthony, it’s fair to say, has had little contact with homelessness.   

“He lives a very privileged life and things are done for him and I think he doesn’t really get that,” says Tilly.

But Anthony believes otherwise.

“I know about homelessness, I’ve been camping,” says Anthony before revealing he went to public school and it was “tough”.

“Some of them don’t want help, they are happy with their life.”

That caused a row. But things change when the pair hit the streets, meeting a man sleeping rough in a graveyard and leaving him a couple of meals.

They then head to a fast food restaurant where a man tells the pair that he is struggling with life. He says: “I’ve been out of jail for a while, I just feel like going back. I can’t stand it.”

The encounter leaves Anthony overwhelmed and on the brink of tears as he smokes a cigarette to calm himself.

“Speechless. Isn’t that horrendous? He’s got no address, he’s got no phone, so he hasn’t got a bank account,” says Anthony.

“He wants to go back into prison because he can’t cope with life. It’s appalling.”

He continues: “Obviously, it’s there but I’ve seen it, I’ve tasted it, it’s really shocking. I was wrong to say some people don’t want help. It’s appalling. Dreadful. So thank you for showing me.”

There are a record-high number of people on the streets in England and the sight has become so common that it almost desensitises us.

It’s a point Crisis chief executive Matt Downie made recently in response to rough sleeping statistics that showed peaking figures in London.

“This is now a normalised emergency – years of rising homelessness has desensitised us to the stark reality that thousands of people have nowhere safe to stay and have to sleep on the streets,” said Downie.

Nor is it unusual for prisoner leavers to fall into homelessness or prefer to go back inside.

In the past two years we have seen a rise of 82% in the number of people coming out of prison homeless, Nacro’s Campbell Robb wrote last year. That’s due to a rise in the number of people being released from prison due to overcrowding as well as rising wider homelessness.

Handcuffed shows that even the most privileged can be humbled when confronted with the homelessness crisis that has been allowed to develop across the UK.

Handcuffed is showing now on Channel 4