Benefits Street

I ran out of time to blog yesterday. Work is pretty full on at the moment (always in fact). Then, by the time I took boy 2 swimming, and went to the gym, and had a bath, the time had gone.

At least my busy evening means I don’t need an excuse for not watching Benefits Street. Not that watching a programme is a prerequisite to criticising it – remember the outrage over Brass Eye? So, either the people in this programme are scum abusing the benefits system, or people struggling to make ends meet, having been let down by education and the post-industrial UK. Apparently. I’m guessing it falls into the 99% of life that is ‘much more complicated than that’.

I am acutely aware that I had a very safe and supportive environment in which to grow up. I had parents who were generally there, fed me, provided (both buying and through the library) all the books I could want, and encouraged me to ask questions and find things out.

I went to the local comprehensive, but it wasn’t exactly St Stabby’s Academy for the Criminally Deranged. Yes, there were kids with issues but not so many as to disrupt learning (though they got close in Mrs Fisher’s English lessons). And kids who wanted to learn may have had some name-calling on (rare) occasions, but were left to get on with it.

And I was in the last year which had no university student loans at all. My education was provided free to me (grant and parental contribution). Have I paid that back in extra tax since? Definitely. Did I take it for granted at the time? Sure did. But I am now aware of what a huge privilege that was.

My (admittedly somewhat rambling) point though is that the world I grew up in gives me no valid frame of reference from which to analyse Benefits Street. And that is likely to be the same for most of us. The world of the cheat and the world of the struggler are equally far from me. And I don’t really want the television to tell me how to feel about them. (Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe got this spot on – as usual). It’s the equivalent of the Two Minutes’ Hate.

What with government spin, surveillance, prolefeed, and the Lottery, Orwell seems ever closer. Though in my darker moments I do wonder whether his should be congratulated for his prescience, or seen as the writer of the instruction manual that everyone since has copied.