Surprised that a couple of the people I think of as friends, appeared to be joining in with the condemnation of the unemployed, I switched the programme on to see what it was about, and in fact I couldn't watch for more than five minutes because it did feel horribly voyeuristic, to the point of being crass. The section I watched certainly didn't give a balanced view of the story at all, it was pure government propaganda, designed only to turn one section of the poor against another, and I asked myself why I am paying my licence fee each month, when I'm so hard up, to watch rubbish like this.
And I wondered if viewers were astute enough to realise, it's the unemployed and those suffering from mental health problems this time, but soon enough, ministers will turn on other groups in society they don't like, such as pensioners who don't own their own homes and rely on "state hand-outs" to feed themselves and "drain the NHS of vital resources" with their expensive hip and knee replacement operations. There is a wrong and dangerous assumption that politicians will always look after pensioners, because this group routinely turns out to vote in general elections; it makes sense to keep them onside, commentators profess; this is why pensioners were made exempt from the government's widely condemned Bedroom Tax. And yet, the Tories refuse to give an assurance that pensioners will continue to be excluded from the ruling, after 2015.
Make no mistake, if it suddenly suited them, the Tories would turn on pensioners in the blink of an eye. Imagine, for a moment, a scenario where a private corporation specialising in end of life care was lobbying the government to persuade the elderly that, when you reach a certain age, and your declining health makes you a financial liability to society, it's better to go with dignity than to hang around and be despised by all those hard-working, tax-paying families in your community. In a situation like that, do we really think politicians would have so much professional integrity and so much compassion, that they'd instantly show the lobbyists the door? Or would some of them see the potential for a little business to be done? It sounds like something out of a dystopian novel, but then so does forcing people who've had strokes, heart attacks and cancer to look for full-time work, so people will have to draw their own personal conclusions on this one.
But back to my objection to this odious little programme, where the audience is encouraged to mock and deride people who can't find a suitable job, I'm struggling to justify paying £12.12 a month to have these ignorant Daily Mail style opinions beamed directly into my sitting room on a Sunday night. I mean why would I do that, when I refuse to take a Daily Mail when they're trying to force a free copy on me in Smiths or Waitrose!
A growing number of us are starting to question whether we can continue to support the BBC while it seems to have become nothing more than a mouthpiece for right-wing bigots. And I get the impression most of us objecting, do see the value of a publicly funded broadcaster, but only if it were to return to a time where its name was once again synonymous with high calibre, informative and impartial material. While the BBC continues to chase viewing figures, simply by competing with the rest of the lowest common denominator programme makers, it relinquishes its place in the nation's heart, and I think those of us who grew up with the high quality public service it used to be, have an obligation to try and preserve that for our children and grandchildren to come.
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