Delivering a real shock
NOT even the most talented TV producer can see into the future. For that reason, given the length of time it takes to plan, script, film and edit an hour of telly, every programme is a hostage to fortune.
Programmes about troubled companies in the most volatile of industries, you could say, suffer this more than most. MODERN
TIMES ( BBC2), which spent months following employees and customers of the courier firm City Link, wasn’t necessarily stymied by what happened over Christmas.
City Link’s employees, who discovered via the news on Christmas Day that they were jobless, certainly were stymied. Undaunted, the producers hastily tacked on an extra front and back section in which they mentioned the well- known delivery firm going into administration and interviewed a few of the now- disgruntled people who’d previously been cheerfully taking part in the programme.
It added a chilly touch, not just to the ending, but to the whole thing. However happy all these folk were in their jobs, however hard they were grafting away at
their respective bits of the supply chain, they didn’t know what was coming. We, uncomfortably, did, and while that wasn’t nice, it certainly kept us watching.
For all its lack of suspense, this film didn’t take us where we’d expected, though. It was the customers, rather than the drivers, packers and managers who provided the main goods.
Under the guise of seeing City Link’s customers, we peered into the households of a few, dedicated online purchasers and saw what the internet was really doing for modern times.
There was one lady who was like a sort of Bond villain, but nice, surrounded by fluffy dogs in a fortified compound, monitoring deliveries via CCTV feeds.
In Manchester’s troubled Moss Side, another lady lived out a vintage fantasy in floral frocks, surrounded by chintz, all delivered, of course, by City Link. Then there were the Midlands couple, who’d turned the back of their ordinary semi into a jungle.
Everything was about escape, and turning your back on the world. The internet was enabling all this.
Behind the decision to tell two thousand plus people on Christmas Day that they’d lost their jobs, lay a certain lack of humanity. It’s what you see on our deserted and failing high streets, where online shopping has sacked many more.
BRITAIN’S LARGEST PRIMARY SCHOOL
( Channel 5) didn’t investigate why there is a school in Barking with 160 staff and 38 classrooms. Nor did it waste much time considering whether the 1,100 pupils of Gascoigne Primary would have been better off in a number of smaller schools.
It would have been like asking TV cops Scott and Bailey what they thought about judicial reform.
Wisely, this programme goes for the humans in the thick of it, the kids sinking or swimming, the teachers giving their all under constant, ever- shifting pressures.
Unlike the kids of Mr McNally’s over- stuffed class, with their dozens of mother- tongues and backgrounds, I never wept to see a teacher go at the end of the summer term.
That’s because in my 300- child, uniformly Anglo- Saxon primary, I never had a teacher as caring and committed as Mr McNally.