Sneering at the owners of £1 houses is cheap and nasty
Should a Channel 4 researcher ever invite you to take part in a ‘serious social documentary’, run a mile. Then keep running — and don’t look back.
These programmes, from Benefits Street to dogs on The dole, claim to be investigations of class and urban squalor, but they’re just excuses for viewers to sneer. The £1 Houses: Britain’s Cheapest Street (C4) is no different.
Every shot is edited as cruelly as possible. If a television could smirk and roll its eyes, your screen would do nothing else for the entire hour.
We were eavesdropping on a council project in Garrick Street, liverpool, where buyers were able to purchase derelict properties for a nominal £1 fee, providing they guaranteed to renovate them within a year.
But the producers didn’t seem very interested in the scheme’s feasibility, just the slapstick laughs on offer as people’s dreams fell apart at the seams.
look, here’s a young couple, doing up their own home and trying to put up a plaster ceiling rose — with a screwdriver! don’t they know anything? oh, now they’ve dropped it, and she’s pretending it isn’t chipped.
That’s hilarious, because they can’t afford to buy another one. And now they’re bickering!
These shows are known as ‘poverty porn’. Viewers are meant to relish the sight of people struggling to make ends meet. It’s degrading for everyone.
Some can cope, naturally, and good luck to them. I especially liked the builders, a trio from Barnsley, who reckoned that this part of liverpool was so rough, they’d need bullet-proof vests to work on the roof.
one bloke, reading about a recent spate of shootings, said: ‘You wouldn’t get me living here for a gold pig!’ Is that a real Yorkshire saying, or was he just laughing at the daft Southern camera crew?
I felt less comfortable watching Victoria, a Phd student who had borrowed 40 grand from the Bank of Mum and dad.
Some days, she was brave and brisk, looking forward to the challenge of building a home on her own. on other occasions, she was curled up in a puddle of tears, with a hoard of boxes piled around her — clearly too vulnerable to deal with the merciless TV team.
For the sake of justice, the makers of such shows should be put on trial. If found guilty of mistreating their subjects, they could be despatched to the back of beyond, to bring back footage for Earth’s Natural Wonders (BBC1).
Filming this show must be punishing work. We followed a crocodile ranger on Australia’s north coast, collecting reptile eggs for hatcheries: the baby crocs will be nurtured, fattened up and turned into handbags.
Then it was off to Siberia, and a 500-mile trek across the Arctic wastes for a reindeer migration — before flying to the central African rainforest (five days’ trek from the nearest city) to take part in a hunt. This looked warm, at least until one crew disappeared on the river at night, and another boat was almost sunk while searching for them.
This series takes pride in delivering the most unexpected images, telling stories that range from the obscure to the utterly unknown.
The format can feel bitty: no sooner had we started to understand how the African village functioned, with its day-long debates over every decision, than we were whisked to a tea plantation in India with its own squad of elephant police.
It’s never boring, though, that’s for sure.