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In the 50s and 60s films like Ken Loach's Kes and plays like Friday Night Saturday Morning confronted the realities of working class life and poverty in parts of the UK but more recent portrayals have been described as poverty porn - Benefits Street and Shameless have focused on the working class as feckless.

Have the salt of the earth become the scum of the earth?

A play opening at the National Theatre today, Beyond Caring, focuses on the lives of three cleaners on zero hour contracts, the writer Alexander Zeldin is hoping to show people living in a particular set of circumstances.

"What myself and my collaborators are trying to show... is people living and hoping and making friends and trying to find solidarity and contact with one another," he said.

Academic Sam Lay wrote 'British Social Realism: From Documentary to Brit Grit' is uncomfortable with the use of difficult circumstances in people's lives in as entertainment.

"The intent just to serve up people's misery from terrible difficult lives just for entertainment is really very disturbing to me," she said.

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