HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES!
A millionaire family that splashes out £1,700 a week swapped homes (and lives) with one that scrapes by on £138 . . . with utterly intriguing results
THERE are three cars gleaming in the Bentley family drive: a Porsche, a range rover and — of course — a rather splendid Bentley. ‘everyone used to say we should have one, with our name,’ smiles millionaire Terry Bentley, who made his fortune via loft conversions.
Terry bought his company for £5,000, but when he sold it six years ago it was turning over £42.5 million.
The cars are the first thing single mother Angela Carter-Begbie sees when she crunches up his sweeping gravel drive in Lincolnshire, four kids in tow, to take part in a daring new ‘lifeswap’ TV programme. Angela’s name might sound posh, but her life certainly isn’t.
She drives a clapped-out Skoda (on the days where she can afford petrol). ‘I thought I’d died and gone to heaven,’ says Angela, 42, of the modern, four- bedroom home on an exclusive estate that she got to call her own — albeit only for a week.
‘Their house is the sort of place you dream about, all beautifully done out, like a showroom.
‘The kitchen is massive and they’ve got three bathrooms so no one ever has to share. I can’t even swing a cat in my bathroom at home — and I have to sharee it with my four kids.’
If you’ve ever wondered how the other r half live, then this programme not only y answers the question, but lets participants have a taste, too. The rich families in each episode are drawn from Britain’s most affluent ten per cent — while the poor families come e from the bottom ten per cent.
The format sees them nott only moving into each other’s’s houses, but stepping into their eir lives as they are given thehe spending money the other er family has in a typical week.
And this is where the chasm sm between the ‘ haves’ and thehe ‘have nots’ is truly laid bare.
The millionaire Bentleys — Terry, wife Sharon, both 54, and their daughter Kaylee, 26 — are horrified to discover they will have just £138.83 to survive on. n.
This is how much Angela has each week after she pays her rent and bills. It has to cover food. ood. Kaylee, who spends a staggering ring £ 300 a week on clothes, has trouble taking it in. her life includes fine dining, nights out where she doesn’t even think of a bill (a single evening can cost hundreds, she admits), and the creditredit card never lets her down.
BACK in the glossy kitchen Kaylee has just left, there is disbelief, too, when the Carter-Begbies gather round as Angela counts out the cash. And counts. And counts. Their spending money for the week? £1,797.43.
Angela looks as if she might be sick. ‘It would take me three and a half months to earn something like this,’ she says.
Doubtless this programme will prompt accusations that it is another example of ‘ poverty porn’ — using vulnerable people’s perilous financial situations as entertainment. But it does provide a fascinating glimpse into how polarised our society is.
Ask Angela what most surprised her from the experience of living ‘rich’ for a week, and she says it was the sudden influx of leisure time.
Sharon doesn’t work and Angela had little to do: ‘I could sit and read a book,’ she says. ‘I’ve been trying to do that for two years and I just never get a moment.’
Divorcee Angela juggles three jobs — she works in a shop, cleans houses and is also a trained massage therapist — leaving little ‘me’ time.
By contrast, Sharon and Kaylee enjoy regular spa days. While they spend upwards of £200 getting their hair done (more if they have their make-up applied, as Kaylee likes to), Angela makes do with a once-in-a-blue-moon £20 packet of home dye.
‘It opened my eyes to how much work goes into being poor,’ says Angela. ‘It’s so time consuming. The Bentleys go round Waitrose once, buying whatever they feel like. I go to maybe three or four different shops to search for bargains.
‘I can’t spend more than about £30 on the big shop. I often end up eating leftovers myself because there just isn’t enough to go round.’
Indeed, the strain in Angela’s lifestyle — which she sums up as, ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul, then borrowing from Susan’ — is all too clear. ‘I get by juggling credit cards, moving debt from one to the other. I’d love to own my own house, but it’s a dream I can’t see coming true unless I win the lottery.’
So what was it like living like lottery winners for a week?
On the first night, Angela and her children, Josh, 21, Lara, 18, Callum, 16, and Katy, 14, blow £43 on a Chinese takeaway. Then, during a shopping trip for a night out — both events a novelty — she spends several hundred pounds on an outfit.
There is a sobering moment where Katy confesses she hadn’t realised how poor the family were until she experienced ‘rich’.
Angela admits: ‘That was upsetting, but I think that the overall experience was good for them. I wanted to show them it’s possible to live like that. I hope it motivates them to think that if they work hard, they can have a life like that.’
WHAT of the flip side to this experiment? The rich family living a poor life for a week? It’s fair to say it was always going to be Kaylee who would struggle. She is presented as the stereotypical ‘Poor Little rich Girl’.
In person, she is at pains to point out she isn’t a pampered princess. She works (managing a restaurant) and says she is appreciative of how hard her dad worked. But she admits her lifestyle is off-the-scale lavish.
She has a vast expanse of wardrobes in her bedroom, a collection of Gucci sunglasses and an en- suite bathroom of her own.
Was Kaylee horrified when she entered the three-bedroom, one bathroom, terrace council house, also in Lincolnshire? Inside, she does her best to be tactful but outside, she can’t contain her disgust.
‘Is that poo?’ she shrieks, spotting dog mess in the tiny back yard (the Carter-Begbies have a chihuahua). ‘I’m not being funny, but I couldn’t live like that,’ she says. Mum Sharon
jumps to Kaylee’s defence, agreeing this issue isn’t about money. ‘You don’t have to be rich to be clean,’ says Sharon. ‘And the dog mess was everywhere in the whole area. It was one of the things we found quite difficult.’
Actually, Sharon and Terry, who came from relatively humble beginnings (Terry lived with his single mum in a caravan) cope admirably with the lifestyle shift, seeing it as a sobering reminder of how far they have come.
On the first night Sharon goes through the freezer trying to feed everyone. Next day, they gamely go to Asda and Terry doesn’t complain when he has to swap his posh bread for a sliced, white one.
Kaylee struggles, though. It’s hard stepping into someone else’s shoes when you still want to keep on your own Jimmy Choos. The programme’s defining moment comes when she has to do Angela’s cleaning job — and stands, frozen in horror, in someone else’s bathroom with a can of bleach.
‘ I am not touching where someone else has gone to the toilet,’ she says. ‘I wouldn’t even sit on a public toilet.’
The Bentley’s social life — which revolves around lavish restaurants and shopping — stops. They spend one night, playing on the Wii, because it is the only thing they can think of doing that is ‘free’.
‘That was actually quite fun,’ says Sharon. ‘What it did make me realise was how much time we spend apart in our house, because there is the space to do so.
‘Here we were on top of one another, which was really difficult, but it kind of forced us to do things as a family, too, which was good.’
For Kaylee, the big eye opener about the lack of money was how it curtailed her freedom. ‘If I’m bored normally, I just tend to jump in the car and go out, go shopping or just go and see friends.
‘I found it really difficult not to be able to do that.’
SHE returned to her own life (and a Next delivery) feeling relieved. ‘We knew we would be going back to our real lives,’ she says.
‘I don’t think I could have done it the other way round.’
That’s certainly the message from two other families in the programme. The Caddy family, of Weston- super- Mare, have five children and live in a sevenbedroom mansion with four bathrooms and a home cinema.
Mum Claire, 52, works as an art teacher, but dad James, 51, has been semi-retired since selling his software company in 2004. They have a weekly budget, after bills, of £1,700. Much of their spending goes on exotic travel and their children are privately educated.
The Williams family live just 22 miles away, but in a different world. Dad Antony, 29, is a picker and stacker in a warehouse, while Kayleigh, 26, is a full-time mum to their four children. After rent and bills, they have less than £110 each week to spend. They would actually be better off on benefits, but Antony believes that ‘the only way for me to progress is to work’.
Their three-bedroom semi is rented. Antony wants to get on the property ladder. ‘But that seems like a dream at the moment,’ he says. ‘Where I grew up, on the actual street where Billy elliot was filmed, we thought people were rich if they had a doorbell.
‘Now suddenly I was in this house where they had a cinema room. And seven toilets! I couldn’t get my head around it.’ Theirs is perhaps the most poignant story in the show. When Antony is asked about the biggest revelation of being rich, his answer is touchingly surprising.
‘The biggest thing is a bit odd, but I realised that other people don’t dread the postman coming like we do. We hate to see him coming because he’s always bringing bills, bad news, or a letter telling us that someone is after us for something. They get handwritten envelopes from places like Australia. It looks like people are writing to them in a nice way.’
For a week, the Williams family live the dream. Antony buys one of his sons a pair of branded trainers. There are tears all round. He buys Kayleigh a ‘proper’ necklace to replace the £2 one he bought her when they first met.
‘To see her with that, and know that it wouldn’t turn her neck green, was amazing,’ he says.
After filming he realised he hadn’t bought himself anything. ‘Old habits die hard,’ he says.
He watches his children have piano lessons and marvels at the fact they could all have their own bedrooms and no one had to put money in the electricity meter. ‘They don’t have one! I don’t think they even think about these things,’ he says.
‘My life is the opposite. There was a school trip the other week and all four of them had to go on it. That was £24 I had to raise. I had to work an extra day’s shift for it.’
Was the experiment worthwhile for them? Only in the most poignant way. ‘It let us forget about our own life for a week. It was like being on an all-inclusive holiday.’
Then they had to go home. And yes, the postman had delivered new bills.
Rich House Poor House, Channel 5, Thursday, 9pm.