Reblogged form Beastrabban\'s Weblog:
In my last blog post I recommended anyone with an interest in historic
technology to watch Beat the Ancestors, a programme on Channel 5 on
Mondays, in which a team of engineers, craftsmen and film special effects
technicians attempt to recreate and improve upon a device from history. This
could be a weapon, such as a cannon, or, as in Monday’s programme, a machine
such as the 13th century crane used to build Salisbury Cathedral. It’s an
example of the often excellent archaeology and history programmes, which the
fifth channel is capable of making, and often does far better than the BBC or
Channel 4.
Unfortunately, the Channel is owned by the pornographer and right-wing
proprietor of the Daily Express, Richard Desmond. Thus, an hour after this foray
into industrial history and experimental archaeology, comes another attack on
the unemployed. At 9 o’clock is the documentary On Benefits and Proud.
According to the Radio Times, this is about
‘The lifestyles of some of those living off the state who are not currently
seeking employment, including of a mother of 11 whose benefits are double the
average wage in Britain’.
Now Mike, over at Vox Political, Johnny Void and any number of other
left-wing blogs, like Diary of a Benefit Scrounger are doing their
level best to disabuse the electorate of the Tory notion that there are people
on benefits living good lives at the public expense. One of the guests launched
a splenetic, and hilarious diatribe sending up these kinds of stories last night
on the long-running satirical quiz show, Have I Got News For You.
Nevertheless, they get recycled in order to support the Tory policy of
re-introducing grinding, Third-World poverty to this country to punish those
unfortunate enough not to be working. Not that Channel 5 is alone in this. The
Beeb did something similar a few months ago with Margaret Mountford and Nick
Hewer in We All Pay Your Benefits. Spamfish over at Oprichnik
Rising launched a blistering attack on that one, because of the way it
misrepresented one of his friends. I’ve reblogged the story, so it’s over here
as well as on his site. Go and look at it to see for yourself how disgracefully
manipulative these shows are.
This programme will be broadcast following the story on yesterday’s news that
the Red Cross are having to deal with grinding poverty in this country. Millions
of people in Britain are, according to yesterday’s edition of the
Express, faced with the choice of ‘heat or eat’. They can either buy
food, or pay their heating bills, but they can’t do both. Meanwhile the
electricity companies, already making vast profits, are raising their bills by
another ten per cent and running scare stories about Labour’s plans to cap them.
As for higher executives at the Beeb, these are on multi-million pound salaries,
as shown by the various golden handshakes given to the Beeb’s Director-Generals,
who have been forced to resign following the Jimmy Saville scandal. A casual
glance at the ‘Media News’ section in Private Eye will actually tell
you just how bloated some of these executives’ salaries are. Now I’ve no doubt
that, if confronted about these stories of benefit scroungers and welfare queens
the same broadcasting executive would probably try to justify themselves by
talking about how they were trying to preserve broadcasting neutrality, and
presenting the other side of the argument, in contrast to the stories they’ve
run about rising poverty on the news. They have not, to my knowledge, actually
presented in documentary form the opposing viewpoint that most people on
benefits don’t want to be there, and, in contrast to these highly biased
documentaries, are not living at all. It’s about time they did.
We, the general
public, pay their wages, either directly through the license fee, or indirectly
by watching their programmes and forming a demographic for their advertisers.
The public may pay for the benefits supporting the unemployed, but the
unemployed also pay the salaries of the TV executives. They are responsible to
them, and so should make programmes revealing how the real poor live, not the
minority that are constantly cited to support the Neo-Liberal fantasies of
Right-wing politicos.
