Skip to main content

60 Days on the Estates review – how to make a great show about social housing? Don’t involve Tory MPs

This look at life on two inner-city estates is a gentle, sincere take that sees survivalist Ed Stafford spend three weeks living there. It’s a far cry from the patronising work of Michael Portillo et al

I hadn’t realised how traumatised I remain by Michael Portillo. Not so much the trousers and jackets sported on his train travel, although they remain borderline criminal, but his efforts to engage with The Poor. First in 1993, when he emulated the lifestyle of a single mother on benefits (“For someone like me, who’s never had to think about these things, it’s just boring having to think all the time about how you buy the cheapest things and whether the money’s going to last”). And then again – because those poor and their boring lives are always with us, are they not? – five years ago he gave us a feature-length documentary in which he oozed around the council estates of England in Our Housing Crisis: Who’s to Blame? If memory serves, the answer somehow wasn’t Margaret Thatcher’s reign-defining sell-off of the public housing stock (we had 6.5m council homes in 1980; nearly a third of them were transferred to private hands under the Right to Buy scheme). Instead, it was apparently the failure of councils to build replacements since. Obvious, really, especially if you are a devotee of oleaginous logic delivered with a smug but straight face.

But it all comes flooding back. As do awful memories of Matthew Parris attempting to live on benefits for a week in 1983. He considered the people he met, living “meagre and threadbare” lives, were at the right level of poverty to stay motivated, and returned 20 years later to find how things had turned out. Fortunately, in 60 Days on the Estates, Ed Stafford – who spends three weeks on a London estate then three weeks on its Brummie equivalent in next week’s episode – might be another middle-aged, middle-class white man, but he is not a Tory MP. This, it turns out, makes quite the difference.

Continue reading...

from The Guardian https://ift.tt/XI0Yw1t

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

England booed off after failing against Iceland once more in Euros warm-up

It was a long way from being the triumphant Euro 2024 send-off for Gareth Southgate and his England players at a sold-out and increasingly fretful Wembley. Never mind the result because it was not the main thing, however much it stirred memories of you-know-when against Iceland. It was the performance that raised the difficult questions, the worst one for quite some time and at exactly the wrong time. The home fans, thousands of whom made for the exits before the end, were forced to watch the second half – from about minute 55 onwards – through the gaps between their fingers. And it had not been great before that. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/4ndfQL0
Post a Comment
Read more

Bodies of Men: the love story taking on toxic masculinity in a time of war

Nigel Featherstone’s new novel tackles traditional conservatism and patriarchy through an unconventional romance How can you be a man and be anti-war? This is the question that Sydney-born novelist Nigel Featherstone, who is a pacifist, considered while he took up a three-month writing residency in a military library. He set out to discover what happens to very different expressions of masculinity placed under military pressure. “Australia does have a very defined, toxic brand of masculinity,” says the bespectacled Featherstone, seated by the window at his local pub facing the railway station at Goulburn, north of Canberra, while men on stools at the nearby bar sink beers and televisions on the walls screen horse racing results. Continue reading... from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2N8piOc
Post a Comment
Read more

Coronavirus live news: California sees record daily cases as global infections top 15m

California Covid-19 cases pass New York’s after record day ; WHO emergencies chief says vaccinations unlikely before 2021; global cases pass 15m. Follow the latest updates US daily coronavirus deaths surpass 1,000 for first time since June California surpasses New York as state with most coronavirus cases after record day Nearly a quarter of people in Delhi have had coronavirus, study finds See all our coronavirus coverage 12.54am BST South Africa on Wednesday announced a record 24-hour increase of 572 coronavirus deaths, bringing its total number of fatalities to 5,940, AFP reports. The country is the worst-affected in Africa and among the top five in the world in terms of confirmed cases, with 394,948 infections reported to date. 12.33am BST Dr Deborah Birx, the chief medical officer on the White House’s coronavirus task force, has called the surge in infections across the United States, “a very different epidemic than we had in March and April”. Speaking on Fox news, Bir...
Post a Comment
Read more