“Where did you learn to speak so eloquently, Darren?” is a question I am asked with alarming frequency. It’s supposed to be a compliment. The question is posed so earnestly that I – rather than taking offence – have learned to contort myself to accommodate the expectations of the middle-class people who ask it.
When they pose the query, they clearly have no idea of the subtext sizzling between the lines, which is: “I don’t expect a scruff like you to be capable of stringing a sentence together.” Then again, for many middle-class people in the UK, especially those working in the media, it appears that life is just one big TED talk.
Aloof inquiries like that emerge from a gaping ravine between two very different, formative cultural experiences. Experiences shaped by social conditions so divergent that they often mould two very different types of people, with different sensibilities. On one side of the ravine, people ruminate about the ethical implications of the food they eat. On the other, people worry about where the next meal is coming from. On one side, people discuss the implications of “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces”. On the other, people are so accustomed to anxiety, discomfort and the threat of violence that their threshold for shock and offence is hilariously high.
Understanding and reconciling these distinct sensibilities requires humility (on both sides), mutual respect and a certain level of good faith from all parties. It requires patience, empathy and compassion. Above all, it requires care and sensitivity. Which is why I am thrilled Channel 4 has decided to send a couple of gold-plated wrecking balls into one of Glasgow’s most challenged communities, to finally get to the bottom of the corrosive class disparity that’s literally tearing our country apart.
Born Famous, which will attempt to capture the untold struggle of a millionaire heiress as she ponders how shit her life might have been if her mum wasn’t worth £50m, is sure to draw in viewers. And that’s what it’s all about in TV-land, where a large audience is its own justification. Who needs investigative journalism about a social housing crisis, an ever-more precarious labour market deformed by automation, big data and cut-throat, tax-dodging multinationals? Who needs documentary films about the decline in the retail sector to which many working-class communities became hopelessly tethered in the post-industrial age, or the widely discredited welfare reforms driving residential instability, homelessness and food bank use? Who needs thoughtful, balanced and erudite television programming when you can turn the UK’s most radioactive social problem – poverty – into an episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee?
Was the monstrosity that is Benefits Street not embarrassing enough? It practically laid the groundwork for a welfare state that now treats its clients as suspects in a criminal trial. Did BBC Scotland’s The Scheme, which hideously caricatured an entire community as futureless, not give enough pause for thought? The people who cook up these wacky ideas, under the illusion that they are terribly clever, are about as culturally sophisticated and insightful as the people who ask me where I learned to use “all the big words”. Which is to say, they know sweet fuck all, yet somehow find themselves in the enviable position of creating the blunt instruments broadcast on what everyone’s furniture is currently pointed at.
You can’t simulate the experience of living in poverty. It’s all encompassing. You can’t recreate what it’s like to tread economic quicksand, while you’re being farmed by banks, debt collectors, rent-to-own cowboys, payday loan sharks and telecommunications and social media conglomerates for your money, data and cognitive bandwidth. You can’t reconstruct what it’s like having very little margin for error in a culture where not being “successful” is increasingly regarded as a personality defect.
The ridiculous notion that such an enterprise will expose anything but the ignorance of a cross-section of hapless lemmings in TV-land tells you everything you need to know about why viewers are tuning out of mainstream media. I genuinely hope I am wrong about this programme, that I have hastily jumped the gun and that Born Famous proves to be a direct hit among a volley of woefully destructive misfires. But given the available evidence, you can understand why so many are sceptical.
The real exhibition on display here is the show itself. The fact it’s being made and how it’s being rolled out; deliberately stoking a faux-debate around the issue that will save the channel money it would otherwise have spent on advertising. For all the vast wealth that will undoubtedly be on display, this is as cheap as they come. Let it stand as a monument to the wisdom of the immutable crassness, insincerity and creatively rudderless trendies in TV-land who think Born Famous is wonderfully “edgy”. May this poverty porn draw attention to the glazed expressions of all you socially mobile upstarts who think you’re terribly bright. The only thing higher than your opinions of yourselves, are the exorbitant London rents you’re all selling your souls to pay.
• Darren McGarvey won this year’s Orwell book prize for Poverty Safari
