Hand-Up or Hand-Out?

The Antidote to Channel 5?

Channel 5, if we are to believe their version of events, are engaging in a 'bold social experiment', which we will be able to view next Tuesday evening.  Naturally, this being Channel 5, those being experimented upon are families in receipt of Social Security benefits - hence the edifying title 'The Great British Benefits Handout.'

I should be grateful, in a round-about sort of way, as it gives me an excuse to plug my stories about the benefit claimants the TV companies don't want to show you, who don't fit the stereotypes and don't draw the rantings and ratings.  Instead, it fills me with dread.  After perhaps a small amount of progress, with the Chancellor's defeat over Tax Credit cuts and broadly sympathetic coverage of the people who have lost their personal independence via PIP's impact on Motability, the debate about benefits looks set to become poisonous again.


Channel 5's PR department are already playing an ugly double game on this programme.  The Independent, obviously drawing from a press-release from C5, plays up the positives - the amount of specialist support the families had to manage their money, the programme-makers' alleged desire to see them succeed - although it can't resist adopting the usual language around 'escaping' from benefit dependency. 


The Mirror ran with an altogether more typical tabloid take on the story - of feckless poor people being reckless - and went on to fuel the controversy and boost the advance publicity with the equally typical families hit back at.... story yesterday.  It's media manipulation at its most cynical from all concerned - two versions of what the programme shows, carefully targeted to get both broadsheet and tabloid-reading audiences tuning in and fuelling the Twitterstorm even before the programme airs.


At risk of doing the Daily Maily thing of rushing to condemn before the programme has even aired, I am already deeply suspicious of what is going on here.  For a start, if this was a serious social experiment, why would the families receive their money in a suitcase full of banknotes, rather than by direct debit into a bank or Post Office account?  Benefits no longer arrive as giro cheques to cash at the Post Office anymore, they have been paid into claimants' accounts for years (making me suspicious of the authenticity of references to 'giros' these days).  It's clearly for the cameras, particularly that most exploitative image, which shames the Daily Mirror article, of the little boy with his arms overflowing with wads of notes.


And why £26,000?  That wouldn't be to reinforce the myth that that's what every family on benefits gets, would it?  Ever since that became the 'Benefit Cap', the idea has pervaded popular culture that all claimants get this much in 'handouts'.  Trust Channel 5 to be the ones to let us all see what it looks like in lovely, fluttery notes - just in case all you hard-working viewers weren't feeling jealous enough already!

If I honestly thought this might come close to being a serious examination of the possible impact of a 'citizens' income', I would put up with the usual sarcastic voice-over and mocking music.  But, to be such a thing, it wouldn't only give suitcases of money to benefit claimants.  It would see what a low-waged, long working-hours family chose to do - whether they would live it up or use the funds to adjust their 'work-life balance' in favour of life.  It would give a stash of dosh to a few struggling artists, to see if it helped them through the creation of their masterpiece or allow them to finish that crucial first novel.  The 'social experiment' could take the money worries away from a carer or two, or from someone close to retirement struggling with a physically demanding job.  When you pick only benefit claimants - and, it seems, those with good entertainment value from what has been leaked of their business plans - you aren't experimenting, you're exploiting.

I wish more people would question the vicious class bias that runs through all of these 'reality TV shows'.  There was a trailer on Channel 4 yesterday for Britain's Weirdest Council Houses.  Am I alone in wondering why, when Social Housing tenants pimp their homes, what we see is 'weird', while private owners have Amazing Spaces - and the super-rich have Grand Designs?