It’s a bit rich moaning about poverty porn

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/31/poverty-porn-britains-hardest-grafter-bbc

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It seems pretty dumb to me to object to a television programme you’ve never seen, let alone to one that has yet to be made. But this is exactly what is happening in the case of Britain’s Hardest Grafter, a BBC2 show in which 25 of Britain’s “poorest workers” will compete against each other in a series of blue-collar jobs for a prize of £15,500 (a sum equivalent to the annual minimum wage outside London).

Barely had Twenty Twenty, the production company that is to make the series, advertised for participants than the online petition had begun. “This is the next rung down the ladder in the disturbing trend of voyeuristic poverty porn made popular in programmes like Benefits Street,” insists the man who started it on change.org. “The signatories of this petition strongly object to this degrading and exploitative format and demand that the BBC abandon its plans to broadcast this programme.”

As I write, it has close to 14,000 signatures. Yes, 14,000 people who appear not to care how irredeemably silly they seem.

It’s hard, isn’t it, to know where to begin with this? A certain weariness sets in. Benefits Street has, I can’t disagree, a great deal to answer for, not least the tedium and general badness of the copycats that have sprung up like mushrooms in its wake . But right from the moment I first clapped eyes on Dee Kelly (aka White Dee) and its other characters, I felt that the charge of exploitation was misplaced. Benefits Street was cast as carefully as any soap; the producers wanted performers and that was what they got. Those who took part were no more exploited than the cast of TOWIE or Geordie Shore, which is why, on screen, Dee could sometimes be seen carefully looking beyond the faces of her neighbours in the direction of the camera (“How’s this going down?” asked her smile).

When I interviewed her at the end of last year, she struck me as an unusually truculent person, one who certainly couldn’t be pushed about, by me or anyone. Actually, it was rather amazing listening to her talk to her agent on the phone, deciding exactly what she would and wouldn’t do and for how much. Next time I have to negotiate a rise, I might just call her.

But even if exploitation is sometimes at play in these shows – and perhaps it is; happily, I can’t claim to have seen them all – this surely doesn’t discount the possibility that the BBC and Twenty Twenty can between them deliver a serious-minded series, one that provokes more than just the standard responses from left and right (in fact, it has been commissioned by current affairs, not entertainment, so the aspiration is there, if nothing else). The stories of the poor do need to be told, don’t they? Or are we saying that we would rather wipe them from our screens altogether?

Even so-called stunts can enlighten sometimes: think of Channel 4’s The Secret Millionaire, whose loaded stars seemed mostly to be genuinely upset by what they found as they toiled incognito at the margins (a tearfulness that, in the best programmes, extended itself to the chastened viewer). Done properly, with integrity and thoroughness, stunts are just old-fashioned campaigning journalism by any other name.

Thirteen years after I read Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich’s troublingly compulsive account of the time she spent working undercover in low-wage America, there are still parts of it I can quote almost by heart. Whenever I pass a particular kind of static caravan, a phrase about the “canned labour” Ehrenreich observed at a Key West trailer park floats unbidden into my mind. Whenever I walk the long, soothing corridors of a chain hotel, I remember the fern patterns she was required to make on carpets with her cripplingly heavy vacuum cleaner when she worked as a housekeeper. But what was Ehrenreich’s odyssey if not a stunt, a feat, a coup de theatre, albeit one that involved a very great deal of endurance, graft and close observation?

Did anyone say she was patronising her co-workers by moving among them under false pretences? Not that I heard. Her book was widely acclaimed as a classic of its kind. Nor did anyone, at least not on the left, suggest that its popularity – Nickel and Dimed made it to the New York Times bestseller list – was the result either of dubious editing on the part of its author or of a dubious voyeurism on the part of its many readers. An interest in the lives of the poor, we were given to understand, isn’t always tainted with disdain.

I’m not saying the camera doesn’t lie – or that it won’t, in the case of a series yet to be made. Obviously, it does. Whatever the approach of the makers of Britain’s Hardest Grafter, scrubbing a floor or frying chips for a week with a boom floating above your head and a small crowd looking on isn’t the same thing as doing it unobserved (except by your boss) week in, week out. There are things a documentary team simply cannot capture, or not without difficulty: inward things, the burdens a worker carries with them, whether worries about their health or a row they had with a loved one just before they left the house. When I worked as a cleaner in a pub, it wasn’t the individual tasks that got me down, though hosing a urinal at 8am was never going to be good. It was the tape in my head that said: “I am cleaning a pub, I am cleaning a pub.” It was the feeling that life was going on elsewhere. (And I was only doing it for the summer.)

But even here I must stray from the usual narrative. For isn’t it the case that art sometimes provides the truth that “real life” lacks? Isn’t this why we read novels? A skilled, sensitive film-maker should surely be able to shape a story, even one that has been set up as a (grisly-sounding) competition, in such a way that his audience will see something that was previously obscured – even if this is only, in the end, their own empathy. So, all you petitioners. Well done for getting out your crystal balls and using them to mark the cards of the BBC and Twenty Twenty. Your prescience has been noted. But now, why not just let both parties get on with their work? If they do it well, we will all be the beneficiaries. If they don’t, feel free to get stuck in then.