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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.’
What was skirted round but not directly addressed was the fact that, for some people, mental problems have brought them to a state where homelessness is the only life they can cope with, and the only life they want, except in a distant, unattainable way, as we might muse about winning the Lottery. ‘This is my life!’ a real homeless person said angrily to one of the ‘celebrities’ who’d tried to help. Hardeep Singh Kohli, the broadcaster, said perceptively about the way the life provides the reassurance nobody else can or will: ‘Sean needs Monday to be like Tuesday, and Tuesday to be like Wednesday, because Sean is the only person Sean trusts.’
There was much talk of ‘issues’ — the blanket word nowadays used to mean ‘problems’ without saying what those problems are or how they might be addressed. (Imagine a parenthood magazine, which runs into difficulties with its special edition about teenage problems. They would have issues issues issue issues.)
In the end, this isn’t the kind of thing television does well. Orwell wrote about desperate poverty in Down and Out in Paris and London, and there was no one to say, ‘OK, wash that plate again, Eric,’ or ‘Sorry, that murder under your window, we ran out of tape. Can we get the killer to do it again?’ Some things, by their nature, can never truly make it to the screen.
Psychoville (BBC2, Thursday) is now quite funny as well as disturbing. A sinister figure phones in a death threat, but the recipient’s Mum can’t find a Biro. And Mr Jelly — ‘he keeps the kids quiet’ — is a fine invention. Though the telekinetic dwarf was nicked from Stephen King’s Carrie.
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