Oh, for the days when any bright spark could rig the leccy meter
Forgive me for waxing nostalgic, but one thing was definitely better in the Heath-and-Wilson era when Britain was just getting the hang of decimalisation: the coinoperated electricity meter.
Anyone handy with a screwdriver could whip the bottom off and keep reusing the same 10p piece. The meters didn’t know the difference between ‘ten new pence’ and a French franc either.
True, the chances were that after you’d diddled the meter, there’d be a power cut anyway. But there was a rough justice in that.
These days, as wealthy vets Colin and Lizzie discovered to their horror in Rich House, Poor House (C5), the leccy meter is an implacable digital beast. it works only when a microchipped, pre-pay key is charged and inserted. And every time you boil the kettle, it deducts around 14p from your account — and even more at peak times.
Trying to live on a £122 weekly budget for food, clothes and fuel, Colin worked out that brewing up eight times cost him 1 per cent of his disposable income . . . and that’s before he’d bought milk or teabags.
Usually, he and his family had more than a thousand quid a week to spend on life’s little luxuries. The show didn’t mention it but, according to the press release, their hobby is taking day trips to France, trawling the bric-a-brac markets for antiques. Well, why not?
They were staying in a cramped terrace house in redruth owned by former royal Navy engineer ross and his wife, Sarah . . . who meanwhile had moved in with their two young children to Colin and Lizzie’s spacious farmhouse elsewhere in Cornwall.
Both families were lovely. That’s not necessarily good Tv — this show works best when one lot are stuck-up, selfish pigs with more money than brains.
But this was a simple, appealing narrative. The hard-up couple loved the sensation of having spare cash and a big garden, but it hurt them to realise what they could never give their children.
it was well- off Colin who was most upset, though. He couldn’t bear the idea that people were trapped in poverty, unable to fight back.
So he offered to pay off £8,000 from ross and Sarah’s stack of credit cards and help them to save towards a deposit on their own house. it was a staggeringly generous gesture. How wise it was, time will tell — Colin is wellheeled, but he’s not rich like an Abramovich. We need a return visit, an update in a couple of years, to see if ross and Sarah are happier . . . and if Colin and Lizzie have any regrets.
regrets seem guaranteed on Love In The Countryside (BBC2), which sends lonely farmers on speed- dates before inviting a selection of suitors to sample life in wellies.
rural romance used to be the work of the Young Farmers’ Club, not the BBC — but now that most dating is done through phone apps such as Tinder, oldfashioned discos in the village hall are a rarity. Someone should invent a hook-up app just for farmers. They could call it CombineHarvester.
Quite what the point of this show was, it’s hard to gauge. No one took it too seriously — the eight lovelorn hopefuls passed around the letters and photos from applicants, and had a good laugh at some.
one chap sent a snap of his naked bottom. We can only assume he’s not old enough to remember All Creatures great And Small.
Down on the farm, where vets wield shoulder-length rubber gloves, it’s best to remain clothed and take no risks.