Between the Lines: Our people (1987)

The Between the Lines column from the September 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Our people

It's good to see television which shows what life is like for us working people. Not Coronation Street dummy workers, but real workers talking for themselves about real life. Such TV is all too rare, but Yorkshire TV's On The Manor (Monday. 3 August. 8.30 pm. ITV) showed how to do it. The documentary was about The Manor estate, a mile and a half from Sheffield city centre. Sixty per cent of the estate's inhabitants are below the official poverty line; 75 per cent have no car; only one per cent "own" their homes. The programme showed (with the use of excerpts from a government propaganda film made in the 1940s, claiming that towns belonged to the people and would be developed to make life happier for them) that all that has really happened with the building of new council estates has been the replacement of new slums for old. As Barry Pennington, who lives on the estate, said. The Manor is a prison of poverty: people can’t escape because they lack the money to do so.

Inhabitants of the estate make weekly visits to an open-air market where second-hand clothes and shoes can be bought: three blouses for a pound. Ann Matthews from the estate defined poverty as "people not looking their best, not living in the best conditions". She is right. The poverty of life for the workers shown in this documentary, just like thousands of workers in other towns and cities, is a deprivation not only of what people need in order to survive without extreme suffering, but a denial of access to the extreme comfort which all of us could enjoy. On The Manor workers have boosted their confidence by forming a tenants' association and learning to resist those who supervise their poverty. Such resistance is necessary and educative but it is not going to break down the walls of the prison of poverty. Only the struggle for a socialist society will succeed in doing that.

Naughty people

Capitalism, the most ethically bankrupt and socially obscene system of living in the history of humanity, loves to depict itself as a moral society. The Cook Report (Wednesdays. 8.30pm BBC1) is all about showing that crime does not pay — or that, when it does, the criminals will not escape the public gaze. The idea of the programme — which is very compelling viewing — is that the fearless reporter, Roger Cook, accompanied by a camera team, confronts wrong-doers and urges them to bare their wicked souls to the honest viewers. One week he was on the Costa del Sol in Spain being hit by umbrellas owned by dodgy East End characters wanted by the police in Britain; the next he was exposing the sick traders in child pornography. It is all righteous stuff and perhaps it even puts some fear into people who have put fear into others. But — and this is the but which makes The Cook Report an essentially superficial and phoney exercise — Cook's exposes are only of those who have illegally exploited, molested or lied to others. The legalised criminals are not up for exposure.

When is Roger Cook going to do a programme in the offices of M15. asking them a few of the questions which our masters seem to be rather touchy about us wanting to think about? But then, MI5 vets all employees for the BBC, doesn't it? What about going into the churches to look at some of the corruption there? Cook may well derive some satisfaction from exposing the child-pom producers (who are usually seriously disturbed people and certainly small-fry when it comes to child molestation) but there would be plenty of mileage in an expose on the routine repression of children by the education system. Following East End gangsters to Spain made exciting viewing, especially when one of them punched Cook straight in the gob but when are we to see the next programme on the robbers who have become Stock Exchange millionaires by paying workers less than the value of what we produce? When is Cook going to stop picking at the scabs and start shining the light on the cancer itself? Now maybe some good investigative journalist could infiltrate The Cook Report Office and show us just how stories are chosen to be followed up — and how they’re dropped.

Trendy people

This column has in the past complained about the patronising nature of the presentation of rock music on TV. Well, it's only of interest to proles, and young ones at that — probably uneducated and unemployed — so we'll make it pretty basic, say the producers. Of later matters have become worse; Network 7, the new Channel 4 programme for the 18-25 market, seems to be directed at viewers with serious brain damage. Features on why Tony Blackburn fell in love with his wife and why Tony Blackburn divorced his wife and other issues of profound importance to people inhabiting a world which could go up in smoke at any time is insulting drivel. Trendy, illiterate, artistically uncouth, socially shallow rubbish like Network 7 and No Limits are a reflection of the cultural degeneration of a system which was fit for the dustbin of history long before the kids watching these programmes were born.

Steve Coleman