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His upbringing in Glasgow's poorest high-rise
estates, combined with his fluid patter and fresh ideas on how
to tackle inequality drive his show, "Poverty Safari Live."
McGarvey, 33, tells the story of a working class boy who goes to
a party with his girlfriend's university friends. Dressed first
as his rapper alter-ego Loki and then bespectacled and in a
suit, he dissects the attitudes of Britain's poor toward the
casually privileged and tries to explain it.
The show pokes fun at class; "regeneration" projects with cafes
selling "gender-neutral gingerbread" and warns the working class
in the audience that the theater bar only sells orange juice
"with bits."
At times it is uncomfortable too, tapping into anger and
prejudice and shining a light on how the poor are shut out.
NatCen Social Research has found that the highest backing for
Britain to leave the European Union in a 2016 referendum was
amongst those classed as most economically deprived and with no
educational qualification.
Using his own memoirs as a hook to talk about poverty has proved
successful, and this year McGarvey won Britain's prestigious
Orwell prize for political writing with the bestselling "Poverty
Safari".
"Brexit Britain is a snapshot of how things sound when people
who are rarely heard decide to grab the microphone and start
telling everybody how it is," he says in his book.
McGarvey, who has worked with police fighting gang crime and
with social services helping children with anxiety and
deprivation, suffered an abusive mother as a child. In a drunken
rage she once held a knife to his throat at a party, one of many
harrowing incidents he recounts in Poverty Safari.
"I never regarded my childhood as hard until I saw the look on
people's faces when I talked about it," he says.
He spent years as an alcoholic and drug user, even as he was
working with social services to help young people with the same
problems. The exercise of holding up a mirror to society and its
assumptions about class is potent because he applies the same
process to himself.
"I've taken on a potential tension between middle-class
sensibilities and working class sensibilities and pulled it in
to work, so that it is something that can be used as grist in
the mill for creativity," he told Reuters.
"Instead of accepting it, I'm trying to reconstruct it in my
work to make it acceptable to both sides."
(Reporting by Elisabeth O'Leary; editing by Stephen Addison)
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