Terry Prone: Michael Sheen's £1m debt payoff is more than just philanthropy 

And well able, on this particular day, to reach the high mortise lock on the front door. Young enough, though, to be unable to process what happened immediately thereafter.

Two men walked in, uninvited. That much was clear. One of them wore what she learned, years later, was called a pork pie hat but then seemed merely silly, as if he was playing a cartoon character. Which he proved he wasn’t, when he pushed right past her into the hall and did a head-click that ordered the other guy to go even further, passing the first guy out.

The eight-year-old, like any clever child her age, understood these behaviours to present the kind of threat always offered by the severely untypical. Like any sensitive child, she wrongly believed that in some way she had caused this threat.

The man in the hat leaned over her and closed the front door. That was even stranger. Her mother came out of the kitchen at the end of the hall to check what had caused the heavy knocking, and stood in silence, hand over her mouth, taking in the uninvited presence of the two men.

Pork pie man asked her name. She gave it. He promptly unfolded a sheet of paper and presented it to her at eye level without letting go of it. The eight-year-old thought the man looked like the town crier in one of her schoolbooks, although he didn’t say Oyez, Oyez. He didn’t say anything at all.

Her mother took much longer to read the sheet of paper than might have been expected. Then she nodded and retreated into the kitchen, closing the door behind her. Which left the child and the two men in total control of the hall, a control the little girl wanted no part of.

On the other hand, she wanted to see the next installment. The bareheaded guy went into the dining room and emerged with two of the dark wood chairs, one upended, seat to seat, on the other.

He lined up all eight in pairs before opening the front door and carrying them down to an open-backed lorry parked on the street. After the chairs, the table.

Then the bookcase (the books left in reasonably neat piles on the sitting room floor.) A framed pencil sketch by Fr Jack Hanlon, then a well-known artist. A coffee table. A trolley.

The little girl did not understand why these methodical men were systematically gutting her home. Later, she learned that the pork pie man was the Sheriff and that he was taking their stuff because her father was in deep debt.

30 years later, she took a job she didn’t want, in a country where women had limited freedoms because it paid phenomenally well. She took on a decade of day-to-day dissatisfaction, in other words, to prevent a debt-replay.

Debt can cripple next generation

Like parental alcoholism or violence, parental debt can cripple the next generation for life, no matter how that debt came about.

It creates a recollection of helpless guilt, where not even the most committed moves towards saving money can actually halt or even slow the inexorable progress of indebtedness, where even the smallest Act of God can pitch the whole family from worry into despair.

Buying off debt is the subject of a TV programme airing tonight, which stars actor Michael Sheen as himself.

Sheen is one of those actors who has been around forever, and has a sterling reputation, but doesn’t have the instant name recognition of his fellow Welsh actor, the late Richard Burton.

Mention Michael Sheen’s name and people nod, then hesitate, then tell you that of course they know him, but who is he, again?
He has appeared in movies like Frost/Nixon and The Damned United.

As of tonight’s Channel 4 show, Michael Sheen’s Secret Million Pound Giveaway, he will be better known for his new role as an interpreter of debt trafficking. 

The documentary sets out to explain not how people get into debt but how finance companies make money from that debt.

“Essentially, people’s debt gets sort of put into bundles and then debt-buying companies can buy those bundles,” he has said, in the course of advance publicity for the show. 

“And then they can sell it off to another debt-buying company at a lower price. So the debt itself, even though the amount that people owe is still the same, the people who own the debt can sell it for less and less money.”

Are you confused at this point? Me, too. Selling any asset for “less and less money” would seem to run counter to the essential rules of capitalism.

But, according to the actor, this weirdness allowed him to set up a company and, for £100,000 of his own money, buy £1m worth of debt.

Bizarre system of debt consolidation

Not that much property. That much debt. As I understand it — and I don’t — this means the actor took over the debt of 900 Welsh people. He seems pretty pleased with this deal, although, in the beginning, he had no idea how what he describes as a “bizarre” system works.

Having taken the debt from companies selling it at a lower and lower price, he then notified the 900 human beings at the other end of the equation that they were off the hook: He was writing off what they owed.

He didn’t notify them personally — this was all done at arm’s length, with him not knowing the identity of any one of the 900. Nor, he says, will he ever know who they are. Right and proper.

The odd thing is that a few of the formerly indebted may not know how lucky they are.

Some people impoverished and indebted by circumstances beyond their control, which may include the closure of traditionally significant employers in their area are so traumatised by a stigmatised reality that they don’t check their bank account because of how awful it would be to do so.

Consequentially, Sheen suspects, a number of those who have had their debt written off by him may not be aware of their relative good fortune.

Some viewers will go online to see if they got lucky when the show ends tonight.

Public philanthropy, generally speaking, is a puke-making exercise in self-stroking.

Tonight’s programme may be an exception, with a philanthropist going public to explain a bizarre financial system and — in a small way — to reverse the generational damage it can deliver to the indebted.