I don’t want to sound too much like that guy from uni in a Baja Jerga hoodie whom you get cornered by at a house party and keeps exhaling weed smoke into your face but: I never quite understood the American fixation with not liking communism. What’s not to like? Share and share alike: seize the means of production and scatter them equally, a single piece for every man, woman and child, all living together in a perfect harmonic balance. And then I chain-watched four episodes of BBC Three’s House Share (available from Sunday, BBC Three) and: ah, OK. I get it, now. I get why communism doesn’t work.
The principle of House Share is this: six 21-year-olds – Muna, who is in recruitment and wants to be rich; Rian, who is in recruitment and wants to be rich; James, who is just Scottish and here to see a city for the first time ever; Jess, a fringe with a Mancunian accent who is fundamentally offended by the idea that you might exchange hours of labour for monetary gain; Olivia, who at one point attempts to summon a job with a Wiccan salt circle; and Paul, a fashion graduate who was born to wear vintage blazers and clap his hands on the beat of every word he shouts during an argument – move to London and live in a huge, soulless shared house in Finchley. Over the course of six weeks, they have to get jobs, earn money and chip in towards a central kitty, which not only covers the house’s bills and rent (obviously) but also each housemate’s travel, food, drink and sundries.
How do you think this will go? A simple plan for a grocery shop, everyone has a finite sub-budget for their daily travel needs, they all eat and drink and party together? Or: as they are all 21 and idiots, as soon as the house has anything near a positive net balance will someone somehow spend £400 on trainers, which they’ll all have a gigantic tears-and-doors-slammed strop about? Which do you think the 21-year-olds go with?
This constant, fraught pull of selfishness is what is fascinating about House Share. It starts off as a curiously detached TV premise (there is no host, no narrator and much of the camerawork is handheld iPhone shots) but soon becomes life-consumingly gripping: six awful idiots pulling together to finally prove Marx wrong. Each week they have to share so they can all eat and drink and travel to work, so that next week they have enough money to eat and drink and travel to work. And they mess it up, spectacularly.
From an entertainment perspective, this is phenomenally good. It’s Boot on the Face TV: housemates travel to London with hope in their hearts, before every one of their ambitions is systematically crushed by the reality of trying to eat lunch five days a week without suffering bankruptcy. This is just life, isn’t it? Making just enough each week to get by, before doing it again and again until you die. The only real excitement you can look forward to is having a semi-drunk row with your housemate about how you buying four beers and a kebab somehow means he now can’t attend Pride.
I enjoyed House Share, yes, but it did make me grimly aware of the looming threat of a hopeless death. Five stars. Five hundred thousand stars.