Between the Lines: The Beggars' Tragic Opera (1992)

The Between the Lines column from the August 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Beggars' Tragic Opera

Embarrassing. Condescending. Insulting. Unentertaining. Time-wasting. Infuriating. Boring. ITV Telethon (all day, Sunday 19 July) Semi-recognisable stars sing bad cover versions of bland songs. Cut to twenty seconds on the miseries of living with Alzheimer's Disease. Soft focus; sad classical music. Cut to the man from Kwik-Fit who plays the game of seeing how many times he can say Kwik-Fit and look benevolent within twenty seconds of prime commercial time. Donation: a few thousand lousy pounds. The cost of the same length of purchased commercial space; a lot more. Children with missing limbs are shown playing basketball. The audience cheer. Facially disfigured people plead for funds. The studio audience cheer and wave cheques. Silly little proles with buckets full of pennies scream in ecstasy as the scoreboard shows that five million pounds has been collected. Michael Aspel gives that horrible little grin. Five million pounds: how much to the class who own nothing; what a piss in the wind to the class who possess everything. Cut to the phones where kids donate their pocket money and the poor redistribute crumbs to the poor. Bring on the Chippendales. Forget the suffering and think of a hen night in Scunthorpe as the solution to society's problems. Final collection: fifteen million rotten pounds. Less than last year. Don't they know there’s a recession on? Who will take a collection for the wage slaves who are broke after donating two-hundred quid after one lager too many in the No-Hope Arms? Final shot: a line-up of camera-hungry celebs singing a worn-out American tear-jerker. ’There are mountains in our way. . .' The mountains are made of profit; those in need never get to the top. Telethon hands out sticking plaster to a few of those that fall along the way. Isn't that Cynthia Payne amongst the crew of swooning time-wasters? Well as long as it's for charity—and where was the Minister of Fun? Is this reviewer alone in finding the whole performance of commercialised begging, pumping the worker's guilt and expecting the propertyless to provide for the helpless, a hideous spectacle? Fortunately not. Several disabled workers protested outside the Telethon studio, indignant at a show which makes them objects of pity to be thrown crumbs to the accompaniment of hollow cheers. Fifteen million begged-for pounds; petty cash in the world of military madness. It is when the world is free from money that such offensive spectacles will be unnecessary.

Out with the old, in with the old

Panorama (BBC 1,9.30 pm, Monday. 13 July) was about how the old Russian rulers, seeing the end of their bogus 'communist state' in sight, began setting up private companies in their own names using state funds. These parasites, long the beneficiaries of working-class exploitation under state capitalism, are now private owners of capital. These are the new rouble millionaires whose freedom to exploit we in the West are urged to celebrate as a coming of liberty. An ex-Central Committee member from the discredited Communist Party of the defunct .Soviet Union is shown driving a Merc and looking like any other pouncing thief to be found in the gentlemen's clubs of Chelsea. You won't find them in the food queues. Maybe they'll organise a Russian Telethon so that they can appear on the telly offering a few roubles to the wage slaves out of whose poverty they have carved their privilege.

Thieving Queen

Talking of privilege. The Queen of Mean (BBC, 9pm, Friday 17 July) was good for the bile. The film was about Leona Helmsley, the US millionairess who ended up in prison because she was caught not paying her taxes. The film-makers depicted her as ruthless, callous, heartless and out for nothing but money and power. Sounds like the ideal C.V. for a capitalist parasite. No wonder they call her The Queen. Why shouldn't she live like a selfish, useless, uncaring swine? Since when was there money to be made out of caring? Mind you, Aspel’s probably on his way to a knighthood and someone in the Kwik-Fit P.R. department is in for a handy little Christmas bonus this year.

Steve Coleman