"Based on a Nationwide BBC television series"--Cover.

For a month BBC Nationwide reporter Tony Wilkinson lived as down and out on the streets of London, sleeping rough with derelicts and alcoholics, enduring the squalor and violence of flea-pit hostels, then rising above it to work at Claridges. A television crew followed his progress in the role of Tony Crabbe, an unemployed Yorkshire labourer down on his luck. As Crabbe, he was able to win the confidence of the drunks and the tricksters, and to observe the incompetence and inhumanity of the authorities.
He discovered a world which had changed little from the days of Charles Dickens and George Orwell. The workhouse still existed, under a different name, and he was forced to strip naked, and undergo interrogation. A local authority lodging-house kept the fire doors padlocked while the drunks smoked in bed, and in a charity hostel he was attacked by a drunk on duty.
This book is based on the detailed secret diary he kept. It tells jhow he came to like many of his fellow derelicts, and how, after several attacks, he lived in terror of others. It also reveals his fear for the future of a welfare state which treats genuine hard-luck cases with the same brutal indifference as the most worthless psychopathic drunk.