According to the critic Michael Coveney, "the sapping, debilitating and demeaning state of unemployment, the futile sense of waste, has not been more poignantly, or poetically, expressed in any other film of the period.

"[2] The film unfolds in brief episodes, detailing the travails of the working-class Pollock family, who live in a shabby flat in a tower block in London's East End.

Only the nagging, put-upon mother Mavis is working; the bitter, feckless father Frank and the couple's two sons Colin, an extremely shy young man, and Mark, his outspoken, headstrong older brother, are on the dole.

Their aimless, querulous existence is contrasted with Mavis's sister Barbara and her husband John, whose financial and social loftiness in suburban Chigwell serves as a comfortable facade for their lacklustre marriage.

Mark mocks his father, teases Colin by calling him "Kermit" and "Muppet," and makes insinuations about Barbara's troubled relationship with her husband.