How the Other Half Lives, Thursday 9pm, Channel 4

Posted by Stewart Turner

How the Other Half Lives

There’s really nothing worse than a relentlessly cocky posh kid, is there? And with this in mind, this latest slice of poverty TV kicked off with footage of 13-year-old George Abingdon showing us “daddy’s best car”, taking time out in the billiards room, and reeling off a list of his famous Gloucestershire neighbours. “If you’re born poor, you can easily change it,” he boomed, with one eye on a safe Tory seat.

The format of How the Other Half Lives is a little like that of The Secret Millionaire, but instead of charities, here the cigar-chomping businessmen help out needy individuals. In the rich corner this week was David, a marketing guru who got on his bike and worked himself up from nothing “because he didn’t want to be broke”. In the poor corner was Cal, an ex-crusty who lived in a horse box for 18 years before making the life-changing decision to turn her back on The Levellers and become a barrister.

While it was all refreshingly celebrity-free, and a genuine pleasure to see some poor people on the telly who didn’t conform to the beloved white-cider-slugging stereotypes so beloved of TV execs, the whole thing left a seriously sour taste in the mouth. David admitted that he was motivated to take part in the show by the look of sheer horror on his son’s face when – gasp – walking through cattle class on a plane once. He decided to reach for the leather-bound cheque book and indulge in some poverty tourism to knock his boy back into line.

Feeling inspired, David took the kids on a tour to see his working-class roots up in Birmingham. “Can you see how close together the houses are?” he asked. “They call these terraced houses,” he explained. Later he raged against the old school tie network preventing Cal from getting the pupilage at a law firm she needed – after putting in a call and trying to pull a few strings himself.

There were gifts of laptops and guitars to the soundtrack of a mournful piano, posh tweenies talking about how awfully horrid money is, and a bit of gawping at the Abingdons’ big garden. While I don’t doubt the sincerity of David, Cal and the gang, giving just one person a lift out of poverty doesn’t really help anything other than the cause of mawkish TV.

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