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Benefits cheats?
Wednesday, 10 March 2010
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Last night on BBC1 there were two programmes which presented an aspect of the world of work familiar to millions of people in the UK: seeking it. Both sought to understand the experience of joblessness through the presentation of a small number of individuals currently looking for work in the UK. However, here the similarities between them ended.
The first, ‘Famous, Rich, and Jobless’, 9:00pm, chose to present its case by getting a range of alleged ‘celebrities’ to pretend to be jobless for a 4-day period. These four individuals were each given £40 (reflecting 4 days’ Job Seekers Allowance) and transported (in what appeared to be rather plush limos) to areas of the UK with high-unemployment.
Now I have nothing against the technique of someone from outside a social group entering it, in order to try and understand the experience of being part of that group. Indeed one can think of excellent similar exercises with the unemployed and working poor in the UK from Polly Toynbee, and in the US from Barbara Ehrenreich. To stretch the point a little, it’s not inconceivable to place Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier in the same category.
But the premise behind Famous, Rich and Jobless is an assumption that viewers would be unable to relate to worklessness without it being filtered through the medium of (very much employed) ‘celebrities’. Or perhaps this reflected a lack of confidence on the part of the producers that ‘real’ unemployed people could articulate the message ‘appropriately’.
The editing and set-piece scenes of the show evoked a game show or a theme park (a tone of: ‘let’s have a go on the ‘unemployment’ ride – it’s an emotional rollercoaster!’); an attitude quite in tune with the 'casino capitalism' culture we’ve witnessed recently at the other end of the social spectrum. This ‘changing places’ superficiality was reinforced by the time taken by the programme to fill in the work ‘back-stories’ of celebrities. It noted that three of the four had personally experienced fairly lengthy periods of un- or under-employment, thereby implying (not least through cosy shots of the celebs in their ‘normal’ palatial homes) that anyone should be able to ‘make it’ out of unemployment and to the top through a bit of application and graft.
To be fair to the programme, there were two moments which rang true: the first when two of the celebrities who had managed to gain casual work were asked to then return their original £40 ‘benefits’ payment because they were over the hours-per-week working threshold to claim job seekers’ allowance. Both admitted they would probably not tell the DWP they had been working – effectively making themselves the benefits ‘cheats’ whose transgressions they had been seen frowning over at the beginning of the show.
The second was when EastEnders actor Larry Lamb talked to the ‘real’ renter of the house he borrowing for his 4-day stint about her search for work – her authentic voice of the psychological effects of the indignity of modern unemployment rang out, pointing up the tawdry and derivative (Sky1 had an almost identical programme late last year) nature of the rest of the programme.
This one occasion aside, the lack of the ‘voice’ of the genuine unemployed person in Famous, Rich and Jobless was highlighted by the comparison with award-winning documentary maker Brian Wood’s programme ‘Jobless’ (10:35pm, BBC1) which featured nothing but the voices of genuine unemployed people in the UK. This was an insightful, and emotive - without being exploitative – portrayal of the range of impacts of unemployment: on social cohesion; family tension and breakdown; the effect on children of the unemployment in the family; the decline of manufacturing in Britain; the problems of debt incurred by sudden unemployment in heavily leveraged households.
At a time when the call from all sides is for greater local accountability – of listening to the ‘voices’ of those accessing public services around work – it seems vital that the media give us more of those voices rather than assuming either that they can’t speak eloquently for themselves, or that we as viewers cannot empathise with their situation.
Benjamin Reid