When future historians sift through the wreckage of Western Civilisation to try to find out where it all went wrong, I do hope they chance upon at least one episode of The World’s Strictest Parents (BBC3) and one of Deal or No Deal (Channel 4).
The World’s Strictest Parents is another TV variant on the Lad’s Army/Wife Swap theme. Unruly, selfish, vile teenagers are sent from their grotesquely overindulging middle-class British homes to far-flungplaces, there to spend two weeks under the kind of old-fashioned parenting regimes where they still uphold traditions like family meals, respect, discipline and a strict moratorium on dope, booze and the wearing of nipple rings. They return transformed.
In the episode I watched, the dope-addled nipple-ring wearer and an even more feckless female thing were sent to Botswana to live with an army officer’s family. Every meal began with a tradition I’m considering introducing to my own household: the children brought bowls of water and respectfully washed their parents’ hands for them. Other house rules: no lying; no swearing; no smoking; total respect and hard work and obedience at all times. You can imagine how well this went down with the British teenagers.
But the great thing was they had no choice. Sure, there was never much danger of their being beaten with one of the whippy sticks which are, apparently, a key part of Botswanan disciplinary tradition. Not on the BBC. On the other hand, when the boy you’re sharing a room with catches you having a crafty fag and says it’s his duty to squeal to his parents, one of the options not on your list is to carry on smoking as before. Either you fess up and apologise (as the teenager did), earning Brownie points from the parents for your (belated) honesty. Or you get punished for being a lying, devious toad.
Thanks to decades of cultural brainwashing by the BBC/Guardian power nexus, we’ve been conditioned to think of this kind of upbringing as authoritarian, constricting, Victorian. But as we saw in the school scenes, children themselves find these clear boundaries both comforting and liberating. In the optimism, the joy in achievement and the lack of cynicism of these Botswanan kids (which eventually infected the British teenagers too) you had a glimpse of how Britain might have been if it hadn’t been hijacked by the progressive orthodoxies of the left. It made you want to weep.
Exhibit B, Deal or No Deal — presented by the inimitable Noel Edmonds — has been with us for some time. It’s one of my 97-year-old grandmother’s favourite programmes, but only now have I got round to watching it. It’s addictive and depressing in equal measure.
The rules are simple: on one side of the board is a column of paltry sums, down to £1, coloured red; on the other is a blue column of higher numbers, up to £250,000. The contestant must open a series of boxes, each containing one of those numbers, which is then eliminated. He walks away with whatever sum — high or low — remains in the one box he hasn’t yet opened.
So, whenever he opens a box and gets rid of a ‘bad’ red number, the studio audience whoops like he’s just executed a quadruple Salchow; if he opens a high blue number, there’s a murmur of collective agony, as if his entire family have just been murdered by Russian gangsters. To crank up the emotion, each box is held by a real person (and future contestant) whom the contestant has got to know. Enormous emotional investment is placed in the personality of the box holder. ‘Bob, you’re a great guy. A great personality. I couldn’t ask for a truer friend. I’m going to go with your box next.’ Bob then replies something like, ‘Mate, I’d crawl to hell and back on white-hot razor blades rather than see you lose your money. Good luck, mate. I pray to all the gods in the universe that fortune favours your choice.’ The box is opened. It’s a blue or red number. Audience responds appropriately. Then we go through the same thing all over again.
Apart from some complicated business involving ‘The Banker’ (the only character of any real integrity) that’s about it. In other words, while Who Wants to Be a Millionaire offers at least the pretence of being a celebration of general knowledge, Deal or No Deal is purely a celebration of greed. Not just greed, either, but greed barded with thick layers of confected emotion. There is no skill whatsoever involved in winning or losing. It is pure, dumb 50/50 luck. Yet when the contestants’ raw, naked greed comes good we are invited to see it as cause for jubilation; when it leads them to come unstuck we are invited to see it as tragedy. Money for nothing; superstition and ‘feelings’ over rationality; a lottery in which — off camera —the banker usually takes all. Watch this and those future historians will have the Death of Britain nailed.
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