The Tribe Next Door feeds a cult of simplicity that eases the guilt of wealth

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/25/tribe-next-door-tv-shows

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There are so many ways in which The British Tribe Next Door is offensive that it’s arguably amazing the TV programme ever made it to the screen.

The first episode of Channel 4’s series – which sends the British reality TV star Scarlett Moffatt and her family to live with a traditional Namibian tribe, and both sides examine the material excesses of the family’s western lives – has aired to a chorus of outrage from activist groups such as the anti-colonialism group No White Saviors. Chief among its sins is peddling the spectacularly dated myth that all Africans live in mud huts and wear tribal dress. But the crassness of building a replica of the Moffatts’ suburban semi, complete with running water and wifi, in the middle of a tribal village comes a close second. (Is the house going to stay after filming, a strange monument to the days when someone thought this was a good idea? Or will the producers simply demolish it?)

Yet this show presumably got commissioned against all the odds because it satisfies a contemporary hunger for simplicity. In a complicated, over-stimulating and sometimes overwhelming western world, there is something seductive about the idea of stripping down and paring back; of having not merely fewer possessions but fewer choices – fewer demands on our attention and more time for each other.

But beware the urge to romanticise simplicity, all the same. The idea of the noble poor, who by virtue of having nothing somehow achieve a level of enlightenment or moral superiority denied to those wallowing blindly in their creature comforts, has deep historical roots. It’s there in biblical lectures about a camel’s failure to pass through the eye of a needle, and in the personal asceticism of monks or in mediaeval idealisation of the peasant. It’s in the Victorian concept of the “noble savage”, or the idea that primitive peoples uncorrupted by modern civilisation represent some kind of moral ideal, and in the backwoods American romanticism of Henry Thoreau and dreams of a return to living off the land.

It’s still there today in every city commuter fantasising about moving to the country and buying chickens, just as it was in their parents glued to The Good Life’s version of suburban self-sufficiency; after all, a mud-spattered Tom and Barbara might not have enjoyed the material comforts of Margo and Jerry next door, but despite living off nettle soup, they were clearly happier. Back in 2010, the Conservatives audaciously tapped into the same spirit by portraying their austerity programme as a virtuous, almost enjoyably thrifty, process of cutting back on stuff the nation supposedly didn’t need.

Now it’s politics itself that is being simplified, stripped back to easy slogans – take back control, get Brexit done – which belie how impossibly complicated it is in practice. In corporate life the new buzzword is “single-tasking”, or just concentrating on one thing at a time, while Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has famously reduced his wardrobe to identical grey T-shirts to save time thinking about what to wear in the morning. Even the Duke and Duchess of Sussex apparently long to swap the prying photographers’ lenses and the gilded cage of Buckingham Palace for a vaguely defined but simpler existence somewhere in Africa.

Luxury has come to mean less, not more; purging, not accumulating. But somewhere along the line we risk forgetting that for most people, less is generally the very opposite of luxurious.

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The nonsense in Namibia is just an extreme version of the craze for “life swap” shows like Channel 5’s Rich House, Poor House, in which a rich family trades houses and budgets with a low-income one for a week, in a supposed examination of the wealth divide. Invariably, the poor family boggles at the ridiculous amount of money their alter egos burn through every week, before cheerily blowing a fortune on the food shop because for once it’s lovely not to have to think about the cost. Meanwhile, the rich family blanches at their budget before bravely concluding that they can do without his’n’hers massages this week, and actually isn’t it quite jolly to stay in and have a family games night for free? They generally go home chastened to their swimming pool and rolling acres, professing deep respect for how the other half manage and sometimes even vowing to tone it down a bit.

We have moved on from shows like Benefit Street, deemed cruel for holding the poor up to ridicule, into shows that use them to teach the rich a lesson. It’s less poverty porn than soft-focus poverty romance – smothering the reality of what it’s like to scrimp week after week under cosy homilies about how money can’t buy happiness. Which is invariably the sort of thing rich people say in order to ease the guilt of knowing that other people are poor.

You only have to watch a few episodes to realise why these shows have to end on a cheery teachable moment; otherwise, the overall effect would be somewhere between intolerably bleak and enraging. It never seems fair that the kids in one family are spoilt while in the other they’re struggling, and it’s deeply uncomfortable to watch children who have tasted a very different kind of life sent back to their tiny shared bedrooms. The only way to defuse the situation is to pretend there’s something noble and valuable about poverty, as if to go without was some kind of precious gift.

So beware the cult of simplicity, at least when it glosses over things that need to be complicated. Even a simple life is rarely as simple as it looks.