Michael Sheen's Secret Million Pound Giveaway review: Actor makes a brave - but downbeat - attempt to tackle a crisis our politicians only pay lip service to

It's a nebulous phrase, one that can mean anything to anyone, depending on which side of the political spectrum you sit, but watching Michael Sheen's Secret Million Pound Giveaway (Channel 4, Mon, 9pm), you couldn't help feeling no politician quite gets it.

Born and brought up in Port Talbot, south Wales, actor Sheen moved back to the area with his family and it seems that seeing the travails his home town has gone through has deeply affected him.

Despite his success in Hollywood – he's appeared in franchises including Underworld and Twilight, and played Tony Blair, David Frost and Brian Clough – he maintains a deep connection with the landscapes and people of his homeland.

And it seems that connection makes him want to put his success to work – so he decides to take on the big banks and attempt to tackle the debt crisis affecting all those “hard-working families” in his town.

He tells us that half of the people in the area are classified as deprived, and that “borrowing, even small amounts, if you are on a low income, can be punishing”.

So he decides to use £100,000 of his own money to pay £1 million worth of debt incurred by people across south Wales, using the benignly-named secondary credit market, where debt is bought and sold by financial companies, all while interest and charges are incurred by the person at the bottom of the heap.

Every time the debt is sold on, it becomes cheaper to buy, as the finance companies try to milk some money out of the debt an individual struggles to pay back, making Sheen's plan feasible.

Much of this reminded me of The Big Short, Adam McKay's 2015 film outlining the financial crash of 2008, which still ripples through society now, thanks to the cost-of-living crisis and the fall-out from bailing out the big banks.

Although here, instead of Margot Robbie in a bubble bath explaining sub-prime loans of Selena Gomez in a casino outlining synthetic collateralised debt obligations, we had Michael Sheen in an empty warehouse with some cardboard boxes and a picture of George Clooney.

Despite the low-fi aesthetic, the explanations worked, and much like The Big Short, it helped you understand an incredibly complex issue in the space of a few seconds of screen time.

The same anger and frustration comes across too, as Sheen encounters more and more “hard-working families” struggling to get by and having to use expensive credit, simply as a means to get through the month.

“We're not talking about people with no jobs, we're talking about people working, earning money,” he says, “and just finding it impossible to make ends meet.

“It's infuriating, and completely wrong.”

What doesn't work is talk of heists and the robbery of the financial credit system – Sheen finds a huge warehouse to be 'heist HQ', and meets his 'inside man' – the former boss of a debt collection agency.

But this all seems a little half-hearted and incomplete, especially as it turns out the 'heist' means months of waiting for the appropriate licences and regulatory approval before he can buy up the debt.

And it's clearly the banks, credit agencies and debt collectors who act like the criminals, refusing credit, seemingly on a whim, and ramping up charges to feed obscene profits.

Meanwhile, if the politicians really cared about their “hard-working families”, they would act to force the banks to reform their system, so people on low incomes could access credit in a fair way, making lives a little less hard and actually making it easier for them to pay down debt.

But, as Sheen discovers, bringing politicians and banks to the table to discuss a Fair Banking Act proves impossible, leaving the programme feeling unfinished, and dishearteningly downbeat.

Despite succeeding in ripping up debts for 900 people across south Wales, Sheen can't help feeling that “a million pounds of debt is nothing, it's a drop in the ocean”.

It's a programme that will make you angry, will give you the feeling that Sheen is a good man trying to his best in any small way he can.

We could do with more like him in Westminster.