One of Irvine’s hardest working residents appeared on a BBC show last week which revealed the struggles of every-day families staying afloat with the high costs of living.

For the BBC series Broke, filmmakers followed budget funeral director Kevin Blades, who works over 100 hours a week and manages four businesses.

As well as Kevin T Blades and Sons, he offers cut-price MOTs, taxi services and also runs The Roll Shop at his Harbourside HQ, with the self-confessed workaholic delivering Mamma’s takeaways at night to save for his son’s future.

He told the BBC viewers: “The funeral directors are kind of bucking the trend as everybody dies, and everybody requires a funeral director.

“People come to me for a cheaper job to get done. Austerity is there, it’s really real, even people working full time have no money.”

After months of filming around Irvine, Kevin told the Times it was enjoyable to finally watch the finished product on TV.

He said: “We did enjoy it, the majority of feedback has been positive. I had a message from Italy saying good on you.

“They were with me for months filming day and night. If you got a stamp and stuck it on an A4 bit of paper that’s how much they showed, it was a very long process filming from 7am to midnight seven days a week for months, you can imagine the job involved.

“You’ve got a camera in your face and connected to the video mic, you’ve got be careful with what your doing and running the business, you can’t be making any mistakes.

“I just get really annoyed seeing all these people who come to me with no money because they’ve got no jobs because a company decided to shut down the business. I started myself as I was fed up with people being ripped off. I was going to funerals myself and folk saying £4,000 for this £5,000 for that.”

You can watch the show at www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0007fb3/broke-series-1-episode-3.