Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
THE GENERATION GAME
Pensioners with spare rooms, youngsters unable to get on the housing ladder – a new series brings them together... with surprising results
Pensioner Flo may be a loving grandmother, but she still takes a dim view of young people sometimes. ‘They’re always moaning about how they’ve got no money, but they’ve got plenty to waste on going out enjoying themselves,’ declares the 83-year-old.
At the other end of the scale, many young people have their own gripes about baby boomers and their predecessors. It’s a generation gap exacerbated by domestic realities: while millions of pensioners like Flo live alone, many of them with empty bedrooms, the spiralling cost of housing and rent means vast numbers of those under 30 can’t afford to leave home.
Channel 4 explores this in new series Lodgers For Codgers, in which older homeowners are matched with members of Generation Rent to shine a light on the nation’s housing crisis and also discover what our youngsters and oldies can learn from each other.
Alongside Flo, those who sign up to take on a lodger for a week include couple Ted Barrow, 60, and Claudine Eccleston, 65. They live in a five-bedroom house in Hastings yet are far from well off. Following funding cuts both took early retirement, meaning Ted lost a third of his pension. It’s left them with £700 a month to live on between them.
‘We try to save, or we do without,’ says Claudine. ‘I know how to make the most of what we’ve got. I’m the eldest of seven children from a big Jamaican family and we had a saying, “Every nickel makes a mackerel.”’
The couple are not without sympathy for young people’s struggles to get on the housing ladder. ‘I do feel a bit sorry for them as I think it was easier to get a mortgage in our day, and housing was cheaper then,’ says Ted.
There’s no argument about that from 26-year-old Londoner Nicole Moukates. She runs her own business selling clothes online, the modest profits from which would all but be wiped out by the average £1,200 a month rent on a one-bedroom flat in her postcode. So she’s stuck living at home in a four-bed semi shared with four other family members while she saves for a deposit. ‘With a house of five of us it can get quite annoying,’ she says.
When Nicole was matched to lodge with Ted and Claudine the trio immediately hit it off, even if Claudine did raise her eyebrows when Nicole said she loves nature. ‘With those nails?’ exclaims Claudine. It turns out Nicole splashes out up to £600 a month on beauty treatments.
After Nicole moves into one of the couple’s spare rooms, Claudine and Ted are aghast when, after offering to make them lunch, Nicole presents a pasta dish she’s pre-ordered online for £20. Nicole is equally astonished when, on a visit with Ted to a local market, he buys a mountain of fresh fish for £13. ‘That’s about what I spend on lunch every day,’ she confesses.
Nonetheless, the trio swiftly form a bond. ‘Ted and Claudine are really cool,’ says Nicole. ‘Ted plays the drums, which he keeps in his loft, so one evening we just hung out up there. I also did a photoshoot with Claudine for some of my new clothing range, which was such fun.’ In turn, Ted and Claudine were impressed by their young lodger’s enthusiasm, and learnt how to navigate the previously baffling territory of social media. ‘I enjoyed Nicole’s motivation in building her own business,’ says Claudine. ‘And there’s a vibrancy about being around younger people that helps me stay in touch.’ Not everyone hits it off, however. In Brighton the feisty Flo berates her 19-year-old lodger Alfie for buying cleaning products and cleaning her bathroom without permission, implyit’s ing not clean enough for him. ‘They’re too pampered these days – I blame the stupid parents,’ she tells the camera. In London, meanwhile, tycoon Charlie Mullins, 66, and lodger Che Thompson-rose, 22, also take a bit more time to bridge the divide between them. Worth close to £100 million, Charlie has a property portfolio – a house in Essex, a villa in Spain and a London apartment – valued at around £10 million alone.
Just a short distance away from that London apartment Che has been living in temporary accommodation with his mother for as long as he can remember, supporting himself with agency work and relying on universal credit of £230 a month in periods of unemployment. Little wonder that when Che first walks into Charlie’s penthouse, chauffeured there in a Bentley, he can barely believe his eyes. ‘I’ll be straight with you – I’m a rich guy,’ Charlie tells him. ‘You look like a rich guy,’ Che replies.
Everything is new to Che, from the way Charlie casually leaves his dishes in the sink knowing the cleaner’s coming tomorrow, to the £5,000 suits he wears to the office.
Yet as the week progresses the pair gain a better understanding of each other, particularly after Charlie takes Che to see the council estate where he grew up less than 15 minutes away. ‘Once I showed him I came from a similar background and had worked every hour possible, it made a difference,’ Charlie says. It seems to have worked. Several months after their experiment finished, Che is working with a private ambulance company and is full of long-term dreams. ‘Seeing what Charlie has motivated me to work harder,’ he says. ‘Our generation sometimes play the victim, when in fact you need to just get on with it.’
Back in north London, meanwhile, Nicole says of her week with Claudine and Ted, ‘They taught me a lot, particularly how to economise.’ Nicole recently took her sister and a friend to stay with Ted and Claudine for the weekend. ‘It was lovely,’ says Nicole. ‘It doesn’t matter if you’re from different generations. If you have an open mind you can get on with anyone.’