How not to make TV

BBC2’s How the Middle Classes Ruined Britain (Tuesday) began rather promisingly. ‘I’m a working-class comedian who voted Leave,’ announced presenter Geoff Norcott, ‘and I think it’s about time you lot heard some home truths.’ But then came the programme itself — which turned out to be the TV equivalent of a footballer who, faced with an open goal, dribbles about aimlessly before falling over.

The first bit of aimless dribbling followed the shock news that middle-class parents often try to get their children into the best local schools, sometimes by claiming to live nearer to them than they do. To prove it, Norcott joined Havering Council’s ‘dedicated team of sleuths’ on a expedition to root out the fakers — the trouble being that, as the team told him and as we saw for ourselves, the wrongdoers were by no means all middle class. (Strangely, it was almost as if some working-class people want a good education for their children too.)

Next came an even more inconclusive visit to a housing development in Deptford that’s much opposed by ‘the locals’. This might have been a neat way to back up Norcott’s argument about gentrification destroying ‘traditional working-class communities’ — except that the development is social housing for council tenants being built by the not-for-profit Peabody Trust, and the opposing locals are middle-class lefties whose idea of effective protest is to ceremonially pour salt on the pavement so as to ‘ward away the greedy, evil spirits’ of capitalism.

No wonder that the programme soon gave rise to a somewhat different conspiracy theory from the one Norcott intended. Could it be that the BBC was basically stitching him up like a kipper (perhaps even on a plastic ice pillow)? On the one hand, he was allowed to put himself forward as a heroic fighter for his usually unheeded people.