HOT on the heels of all the angry words and accusations during
the election on the subject of poverty and benefits, we had the
last of a short series, 24 Hours in the Past (BBC1,
Tuesday of last week). A group of "celebrities" have been
attempting to represent what it might have been like to live at
various moments of history - not as leaders, landlords, or
generals, but as ordinary people. It's 24 hours, reduced to 60
minutes, of playing at time machines.
The last episode took us into the harsh world of the workhouse,
the Victorian remedy for the poor and penniless: Benefits Street in
breeches and mob caps. The workhouse system was the ultimate
application of the Puritan work ethic. As usual, St Paul gets the
blame: "Anyone unwilling to work should not eat" (2 Thessalonians
3.10). Yes, there was gruel (blame Oliver Twist) and even dumplings
with boiled onions, but only if the celebrity paupers completed
their labours.
This they signally failed to do. Breaking meat bones, shattering
stones, washing bedlinen without a Hotpoint, the assorted athletes
and actors and a former Tory cabinet minister ended up with sore
backs, bruised and battered fingers, aching arms - and the work
unfinished. An attempted left-wing coup led by Ann Widdecombe, no
less, failed miserably in the face of an unrelenting system. The
Daily Mail would have loved it.
The menu in the workhouse was definitely at the other end of the
culinary scale from that revealed in The World's Most Expensive
Food (C4, Wednesday of last week). The programme investigated
with commendable restraint a world where people pay £1000 for a
single truffle or £4000 for a bottle of wine. It didn't concentrate
on the chefs who prepare such food, but on the people who supply
what you have to get for people who have already got
everything.
Why should they want it? "Bragging rights at parties," explained
one bon viveur. Or being able to say, as another quoted, "I can
afford it; you can't." This was, a young woman truffle-dealer
explained, a "niche business" aimed at a handful of ludicrously
rich people "obsessed with food" who lived in Mayfair, Belgravia,
Kensington, and Notting Hill.
It's certainly not dumplings and hot onions, though I think I
would prefer that to the special caviar that one entrepreneur was
hoping to market, "infused with frogs' spawn". It was a relief to
know that the experiment was postponed.
You could switch straight from the end of that programme to
Benefits Britain (C5) and the shock-horror revelation of a
woman with ten children by five different fathers, living in an
unkempt four-bedroom house and claiming enough in benefits to buy,
well, quite a few truffles. Truly, we live in a bizarre
society.
And, where bizarre is concerned, one might also include
Mysteries of the Bible (C5, last Friday), in which
Margaret Starbird daringly revealed a re-hash of a very old story.
Mary of Magdala was the girlfriend of Jesus, or perhaps his wife
and the mother of his children. If you listened closely, there were
odd phrases such as "no real evidence" and "impossible to know for
sure", but it never let the facts get in the way of a good
story.