Celebs take to the streets

Simon Hoggart

Wednesday, 24th June 2009

Famous, Rich and Homeless (BBC1)
Psychoville (BBC2)

Famous, Rich and Homeless, made by Love Productions for BBC1, and shown over Wednesday and Thursday nights, was a mess. It almost worked, but in the end it failed. For one thing, the five participants in the experiment were not particularly famous, and I doubt if any were rich except for the Marquess of Blandford, who legged it as soon as he cottoned on. So the producers were left with a bunch of people you had vaguely heard of: a former newspaper editor, a former tennis player, a former soap star and a broadcaster. Yet the voice-over kept telling us how rich and how famous they were, as if they had managed to snag J.K. Rowling and David Beckham. It would have been more interesting if they had got a cross-section of unknown people, from a single mother on benefits to a wealthy businessman. But TV is now all about celebrities, or people who can be passed off as celebrities. You can imagine the commissioning meeting.

Man from Love Productions: ‘And we think we can get Bruce Jones!’

BBC executive: ‘Bruce Jones? Great! Now you’re talking!’

The idea was to show how people who led comfortable and secure lives would feel if they had to exist like the homeless, taking their chances in freezing shop doorways, begging for coins, coping with officious policemen and violent drunks — while a television camera films it all. To be fair, it was clear that the cameras weren’t there the whole time; they seemed to have roamed around their five — later four — charges, who must have got at least a flavour of homeless living, though you constantly had the sense that, having been parachuted in, the line was still attached to the plane, and they could be whisked back up at any time. Like all reality shows, there wasn’t much reality about, for as T.S. Eliot almost remarked, ‘Mankind cannot bear very much reality television.’

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