Kane's Ladder

Ten-year-old Steve longs to be poor and neglected like his friend Wally, whose parents are incapable drunks.

But unfashionably for Steve, he's saddled with a conventional, stable and middle-class family.

Then, over the course of a year, his father has a fling with a barmaid and leaves home, his mother's response is to start a psychology degree, his sister is arrested for demanding money with menaces and his brother gets a girl pregnant.