On The Jesterification Of The British Working Class: ‘The Hunt For Shannon Matthews’ And The Media Stigmatisation Of Northern Identity

Photo by Umair Dingmar on Unsplash (licensed under the Unsplash licence)

In the summer of 2025, the two-part documentary ‘The Hunt for Shannon Matthews’ (Ben Sheldon, 2025) was released – all about the staged kidnapping that put my hometown of Dewsbury, West Yorkshire on the map.

I watched it, of course. My whole family did. I even made my boyfriend – privately educated and capable of pronouncing his t’s – watch it too. A sort of “look at this crazy place I call home” exercise. Otherwise, I’m not all that interested in True Crime as a genre; in fact, I’m against it. Should we really derive entertainment from other people’s misery? Probably not. But I also don’t believe anybody wouldn’t be at least a little bit interested if the no-go zone they grew up in was suddenly plastered all over video streaming services. Or I’m just a hypocrite.

A thirty-minute drive from Leeds City Centre depending on traffic, Dewsbury is the definition of what you might call a ‘shithole’. And I’m not saying that in the bolstering, desperate-for-authenticity way those who live on the outskirts of some boring village in a 5-bedroom house like to do so. It’s derelict and depressing, and that is what the documentary is mostly concerned with – not Shannon Matthews. She’s nothing more than a good excuse to take a film crew up north, and that becomes rather apparent rather quickly.

Iconic clips such as Julie Bushby exclaiming, “It’s going ‘round ASDA, it’s got to be true!” and Karen Matthews pleading for the return of her “beautiful princess daughter” are littered throughout. The people interviewed speak over lingering shots of abandoned buildings, broken windows, and piles of rubbish. Essentially, whilst masquerading as a reflective piece on a horrific, regrettable crime and making several (vaguely patronising) comments on the admirable “community spirt” of Dewsbury Moor’s population, the overall message is: Let’s all reminisce about this freakshow for a good laugh.

I mean that’s the reason I initially sat down and watched it myself, and I belong to this very demographic of ‘ruffians’, don’t I? I know which ASDA Ms. Bushby is referring to – my mum’s auntie used to work the night shift there, and her cousin, too. One of the graffiti-ridden buildings they show over and over again is the old library, closed down and left to rot long before I was born, and my own primary school is a stone’s throw away from where this crime began. At one point, my dad pointed at the screen and started explaining how he knew one of the men captured in the background of some archival footage showing the search parties they sent out.

So, sitting in my childhood living room, briefly back from swanning around London, I watched my parents with their feet up and my boyfriend looking slightly uncomfortable, and thought, “I don’t like anything about this”.

Perhaps working-class readers who, like me, bear the curse of Academic Achievement can relate to always, no matter what, feeling like an alien. Imposter syndrome, yes, but it goes the opposite way also. If you didn’t fancy spending your second period Religious Education lesson chucking glue sticks around the room and listening to crude jokes about the teacher, you were a certified weirdo – or, affectionally, a “neek” – at my school. What I’m trying to get across through this sudden diversion is that I can empathise with, or at the very least understand, those who escape places like Dewsbury and turn their noses up at everything they characterise as common. Still, I’d say it’s a fairly rotten quality to have; yet it’s one British media seems heavily invested in maintaining. You can even forget, for a moment, that you’ve spent your whole life living right alongside everything you’re laughing at. Truth be told, you’re encouraged to.

Obviously, cheap jabs at the economic state of the town do not make Karen Matthews innocent. She’s an irredeemable monster, which is to treat her much more harshly than the documentary dares to, lest any of its socially satirical charm be sacrificed. To be clear, this isn’t the first time the Matthews case has been covered at scale, and it would be highly surprising if it was the last. There have been dozens of documentaries over the years, all fulfilling the same desire for voyeurism-disguised-as-information, and ‘The Moorside’ (Paul Whittington, 2017), starring Sheridan Smith and Gemma Whelan, dramatised Shannon’s disappearance for the nation. Well, more accurately, as the show’s title suggests, the actual concern was once again the council estate where everything happened.

At some point, we must interrogate what this persistent rehashing and reconstructing of events achieves. There is no new information. Shannon has chosen to maintain her court-granted anonymity. I understand there’s probably a hefty dopamine fix to be found in feeling superior to others, but why disguise that appetite as a service to public interest?

It was a shot of Bushby – who was at the forefront of the public effort to bring Shannon home – in her back garden that made me stop and scratch my head. The camera disregards her for a moment and focuses on the mess of dug-up grass and plastic furniture she is surrounded by. On Roblox, the game ‘Benefit Street’ allows users to roleplay in a 3D imitation of a similar environment. The word ‘chav’ is a staple in the vocabulary of the masses, emboldening companies such as Beauty Bay to use ‘influencers’ like Paul Hiley (also known as ‘Becki-Jo’) in their marketing campaigns. It’s totally acceptable to gawk and giggle at somebody like Bushby, even when she’s supposed to be framed as a hero. What other reason was there to get that specific shot? There must always be some level of mockery when it comes to the representation of working-class individuals. If there wasn’t, we might have to ask why we’re so comfortable laughing at communities shaped by decades of austerity, and when the government and media will stop shifting blame and start repairing the damage they’ve done to Northern England.

On the rare occasions I return to Dewsbury, with my Russell Group education and my (allegedly) Southern inflection, I’m told that I’ve forgotten who I am. That’s wrong; I’m more aware than ever before. It was only when I began applying for jobs that I started thinking about what it meant to be Maddy, short for Madison, rather than Maddy, short for Madeline. Plus, I’m pretty sure there’s no number of First-Class marks that will make people stop imitating the way I pronounce my vowels. If documentaries like ‘The Hunt for Shannon Matthews’ had their way, I’d be shaking my fist at the whole of West Yorkshire. How could I possibly be from such an embarrassing place? I should’ve been born further south, and I should’ve been educated somewhere pupils didn’t perform so drastically below national averages. I lack this finger-pointing impulse, however. It’s not that I’m proud. How I feel about Dewsbury is confusing – I can’t quite put it into words, and there’s a lot wrong with it beyond government failures. But when I read comments dismissing those who came forward to be interviewed again as council-housed, benefit-claiming vultures looking for their fifteen minutes of fame, while simultaneously failing to acknowledge that the production company, Firecrest Films, is really the only party that stands to profit anything, I’m painfully aware that, for most viewers, the real object of fascination was never the crime at all.