Last night on television Gerard O’donovan Tough life lessons for the girls too poor for university
Generation Gifted (BBC Two) was a powerful exploration of social mobility and the fact that children raised in poverty in the UK are only half as likely to achieve top grades at GCSE as their better-off peers. This was the first discovery of a three-year film project to follow six Year 9 students, each identified as gifted, through to GCSE to see how social disadvantage affects their education.
This week’s focus was on the girls: Anne-marie from Port Talbot, Shakira from Tamworth and Jada from Birmingham. Of the three, Jada was the one who had it all mapped out. Her goal was “to get good GCSES, get into the best university and become a paediatrician”. Extremely smart, she bristled with determination and mantras such as, “It doesn’t matter what place you come from because there’s a ladder and you can climb it.” You just prayed she wouldn’t hurt herself running into brick walls.
Impressively directed by Marcus Plowright and Luke Sewell, Generation Gifted was at its best highlighting how money isn’t the only, or even the biggest, obstacle poverty puts in place. The experiences of Anne-marie and Shakira, less intensely focused than Jada, demonstrated how it corrodes confidence and self-esteem, the limits it places on horizons, plus the fear of failure and paralysing pressure to succeed it can impose.
In one sequence, Shakira said she knew everyone on her estate but no one who had been to university. In another, Anne-marie returned home thrilled after an open day at Cardiff University. Over the kitchen table, her mother cautioned that university could cost “more than a thousand pounds,” Watching them look the course up online, feeling their shared shock at realising for the first time it would cost £9,000 a year for fees alone, was shocking in itself.
Of course, there are grants. But how many children and parents never get beyond a moment like that? How many young people not identified as gifted don’t receive the help and encouragement these girls are clearly – and thankfully – getting from their teachers and schools? Generation Gifted made one shudder to think.
Despite a title suggesting just another natural history series, Earth’s Natural Wonders (BBC One) was really about people. People whose daily challenge to survive the world’s most extreme places make our own working lives look like a walk in the park. There’s nothing like other people’s lives for making your own grumbles seem minor.
Take Fire Chief Manolo, whose job was protecting hundreds of thousands of acres of tinder-dry forest in the fire-prone Mato Grosso region of Brazil, and the indigenous tribes that live there. With a team of just eight firefighters at his disposal, a good day for Manolo was spending only 14 hours risking life and limb to prevent vast conflagrations destroying the people and natural wonders of the Amazon rainforest. In peak season, he said, he deals with 50 fires a month.
Then there was Thokmay, a yak herder high in the Himalayas. We joined him for part of a spectacularly dangerous annual trek, herding 200 skittish yaks down near-vertical scree slopes and past dizzying drops to their summer pasture. In the end, the beaming smile on his face wasn’t just because he and his herd had made it through alive, but because he was seeing his wife and family for the first time in six months. That’s commitment.
It wasn’t all work. The film also looked at how climate change is affecting traditional lifestyles in the world’s remoter parts. In the Canadian Arctic, we met an Inuit grandmother who, for most of her life, has made a hair-raising (and spectacularly shot) quest each Spring to harvest mussels from cavities formed by tidal sea ice. With the ice getting more unstable every year due to climate change, it’s a tradition she knows she’ll be unable to uphold much longer.
Less successful was a segment following a group of treasure hunters in eastern Siberia, where permafrost frozen solid for millennia is melting and yielding an unexpected “bounty”. Here groups of Russians spend the summer scouring riverbanks, digging up ancient mammoth tusks to sell for upwards of $5,000 a pop in ivory-hungry China. To be fair, it was pointed out that this mammoth ivory often provides unwelcome cover for the illegal ivory trade. But it still seemed a dubious item to feature, especially so benignly, at a time when conservationists are putting so much effort into seeking a global ban.
Generation Gifted ★★★★ Earth’s Natural Wonders ★★★