They aren't acting, well not all of them anyway. There was a family from an estate where I used to live on it a few years ago, I didn't/don't watch it myself but by all accounts it was a corker. lol
The family were a mum who was a drug addict who pimped out her daughter in the local pubs for drug money. I know the children of the family as they went to school with my kids and lived up the road from us, the whole sorry story is/was true.
The mother died a couple of years ago aged early 40s.