I’ve got another brilliant idea for a TV series.
I’ve got another brilliant idea for a TV series. It’s called MPs Walled Up in Scorpion-Filled, Ebola-Ridden, Plague-Rat-Infested, Acid-Drenched, Radioactive Tower Block of Slow Hellish Screaming Death. All right, so the title does give away the premise, slightly, but I’d still watch it, wouldn’t you? 24/7. Done right — with special feature-length episodes devoted to Ed Balls, Harriet Harman, and the Milibands — I reckon it would be more satisfying than Band of Brothers, The Sopranos, Das Boot, South Park, The Simpsons and University Challenge rolled into one. And from me, that’s quite an accolade.
What I shan’t be watching again, I don’t think, is the tame rip-off of my idea currently showing on Channel 4. Tower Block of Commons (Channel 4, Monday) is a ‘social experiment’ in which various MPs are sent to live like council tenants for a week in a grotty tower block. You can guess the trajectory right away: by the end, all the participants will be appalled and astonished to realise just how out of touch they are with Britain’s broken society and will vow to strive harder to mend it.
And therein lies the problem. You can just imagine Cameron’s people wetting their pants with excitement at getting shadow Children’s Secretary Tim Loughton in on the act. ‘Fan-bloodytastic. They’ve got him staying with a black single mum and he handles it quite well. In the last scene of part one he goes to some skanky grime club and he’s about the only white person there and he bumps and grinds with the best of them. Which is great ’cos that should cancel out totally that Patrick Mercer remark about black people in the army.’
Some of the MPs didn’t come out of it well. Notably Labour MP Austin Mitchell. Austin, your wife is lovely and I quite understand why you’re so attached to her but, for future ref, you simply can’t go into these projects saying, ‘I’ll only do it if my wife comes with me, and if we get our own flat rather than having to sleep on the sofa in someone’s front room and I’m taking time out to go and have dinner with mates in more salubrious parts of town.’ Nor is it a good idea to keep joking nervously and flippantly with your estate host, as if this is all such a horrible experience you can’t bring your mind to accept it’s happening. It’s called ‘not entering into the spirit of things’ and it looks bad.
Poor Mark Oaten had probably the roughest experience when a gang of lads came up to him and said, ‘Ain’t you the one that got done for the rent boys?’ What struck me most about this scene, mind you, wasn’t so much Oaten’s teary misery as the fact that anyone on a rough London housing estate would recognise a nonentity Lib Dem MP from Winchester.
Mildly entertaining though the series is, however, I do seriously object to its underlying assumptions. In true, fatuous BBC/Channel 4/Dave Cameron style, it takes it as read that part of an MP’s job ought to be to know exactly what it’s like to be a member of the underclass and then actively campaign to alleviate their every quotidien torment. But, for me, it’s precisely this micromanaging and agonising about the plight of the poor which got the poor into this hideous mess in the first place.
The reason there are so many single mothers living on benefit, for example, is that well-meaning left-liberals trying to alleviate the burdens of single-motherhood made it fiscally advantageous for them not to live with their baby-fathers. The reason people have no jobs is in part New Labour’s lax immigration policy. The reason these people are more screwed than ever before is that the economy has been destroyed in a debt-fuelled boom exploited by a socialist chancellor to increase wasteful welfare spending supposedly meant to alleviate social inequality but in fact creating a structural deficit which means there’s less government money available than before.
I concede that these are not problems Cameron personally created. But they might just as well be for all the resolve his party of Heathite-managed decline is showing in planning to solve it. Yes, Britain’s broken all right. But it ain’t going to be fixed by making George Osborne live on fried pizza and crack in a Glasgow tenement block for a week (mind you, a year might do it) or Michael Gove spend his weekends oiling the broken swings in the needle-strewn playgrounds of south London heroin estates. A cut in the tax rate would do a million times more to solve everyone’s problems than any of Cameron’s bien-pensant social tinkering.
David Dimbleby’s Seven Ages of Britain (BBC1, Sunday) is the latest agreeable Sunday-night ‘isn’t Britain marvellous?’ series from the BBC. There were lots of shots of our country looking stunningly beautiful. But then some prat felt compelled to insert a totally gratuitous arthouse shot of a bank of wind turbines poking through the mist. What, pray, do these evil monstrosities have to do with our history, our national pride or our ancient landscape?
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