Seven Days On The Breadline
ITV 1
A Tale Of Two Britains
BBC 4
You’re a single mother with six kids and you’re living on benefits in a rat-infested slum in Leeds. What do you desperately need? Why, a visit from mockney celebrity Keith Allen, of course, television camera crew in tow. He will show you the error of your ways, dragging the kids round the supermarket in search of organically-grown produce with a minimum of air-miles. Or perhaps a week living with Mel B from the Spice Girls will solve your problems. She’ll soon have your teenage son out of bed, drinking health-giving smoothies and getting fit in a luxury gym – membership courtesy of a showbiz pal or two. In Seven Days On The Breadline, four game celebs move in with members of the underclass, attempting to teach the feckless poor a thing or two. What on earth did reality TV do before the outbreak of recession?
Of course, we all know the twist in the tale, long before it appears on the screen. Our plucky stars will discover that, when feeding a family on income support, you soon prioritise the price tag over the environment. That you didn’t get poor through bad household management, you were born into it. Then you repeat all the mistakes of your parents, just like everyone does in the end. The programme-makers rub their hands in glee at the inevitable culture clash, the heart-warming learning curve of the haves and have-nots.
No doubt, members of the “breadline” family welcome the distraction from their daily grind and hope someone somewhere will channel some cash and/or ongoing help their way. TV viewers can relax, feeling they’ve done their bit just by watching the programme and tutting a lot. The Government can leave it to the celebs, the Secret Millionaires, Prince Charles and the National Lottery to keep up the hopes of the fundamentally hopeless. It’s a win-win situation.
The same could be said, apparently, of the decade to which today’s recession is repeatedly compared. In A Tale Of Two Britains, our mistaken view that the 1930s were a decade of unemployment, industrial decline and Jarrow hunger marchers was firmly corrected. For the majority who kept their jobs, it seems, these years were actually a golden age, where a million urban slum-dwellers moved to the suburbs to enjoy new-fangled electricity, indoor plumbing, fridges and Bakelite radio sets.
Cheap mortgages and the biggest private housing boom of all time created the sprawl of mock Tudor semis which still encircle our cities. Car ownership doubled, holiday pay crowded our beach resorts with fun-loving families and the countryside with happy campers. Smart new Art Deco factories turned out the consumer goods that everyone wanted to buy, while the foundations of the welfare state were laid with embryonic pensions and the 48-hour week.
How were these wonders wrought? We avoided the worst of the global depression due to the bold actions of Neville Chamberlain and the National Coalition Government, who raised trade barriers and slashed benefits at the first sign of trouble.
The Chamberlain biographers and apologists who hogged this programme could not praise the man too highly. Never mind his neglect of the “pockets of poverty” in industrial areas, those grimy old smokestacks needed to bow to new market forces. Full-on Chamberlain revisionists even “explained” his appeasement of Adolf Hitler – he said a war would wreck our economy and cost us the empire and he was right. There was the little matter of Britain becoming a vassal state of the fascists with a puppet dictator and the unhindered spread of Nazi race policy across the globe. But what’s democracy against a shiny new motorcar and an Art Deco Hoover?
Helen Chappell
About The Author
