I haven't quite given up watching TV but I'm nearly there.
It wasn't something I planned to do. Given the right mood, I can enjoy an evening with the television. I don't just watch serious shows. I can sink into programmes that are merely pleasant and those that counterfeit an undemanding friendship between presenter and viewer. When real friends aren't on hand, fakery will do.
These days, while I still sit down to enjoy the occasional film or music programme, I try to avoid much of what TV offers. That skews my criticism - I ought to know more about the subjects of my discomfort. But there's a limit on how long I can endure some of the latest trends. Sometimes that limit allows me to watch for two or three minutes. Occasionally I last nearly half an hour. Often I reach for the remote or the off switch in a matter of seconds.
My discomfort began many years ago. The council estate on which I grew up was a popular haunt for TV documentary-makers, eager to present all of us who lived there as feral creatures, alienated from society by whatever the bogey-man of the moment was, from modern architecture to the innate stupidity and violence of the working classes. We gradually learned their methods. They would move in smilingly, ingratiating themselves with the locals, praising anyone who would embody the director's views in a speech direct to camera.
There's always someone who wants to be TV. It's easy to find someone with a grievance – or genuine anguish – who can be treated as typical of a whole community. Teenage youths with a sense of bravado are prepared to declare their involvement in gangs, threats, mugging – anything the pretty young interviewer wants – because it's better to gain her smiling approval than to admit the uncomfortable truth that they're only 12 or 14 and their mum won't let them out after 7.00 p.m.
Television lies. It doesn't often tell direct untruths but it lies by selection and omission, by choosing a single person, a small group or a set of episodes to stand for a class, a racial group or a community. This is not governed by the laws of libel – and TV companies usually know how to stay within the guidelines laid down by those who control broadcast media.
Besides, TV offers what the audience and the tabloids demand. It feeds into prejudice, hatred and contempt. I can't talk with authority about My Big Fat Gipsy Wedding because I knew from the advance publicity that the programmes would drip with contempt for the people they persuaded to take part – and that it would add to the daily contempt and hatred which too many members of the Romany and Traveller communities have to endure. I didn't watch. After transmission I listened to anguished voices of a number of intelligent travelling people and their descendants. I noted that they didn't even sound angry – the misrepresentation and the attitudes that programme-makers encouraged in the viewers were too familiar to cause anything but resignation to pain.
Freakshows used to be a staple of travelling fairs but they're dying out now. I've mixed feelings about them. No-one wants to be defined as a freak but the people who toured the country, exhibiting themselves in booths, seem to have found some kind of camaraderie as well as a regular income. Some – like the fat man Daniel Lambert – achieved respect for their courtesy and intelligence. It's hard to think that the freakshows on television offer such an opportunity.
TV freakshows want two things: outlandishness and suffering. The ideal freak-star should have an agonising past with a few ex-friends or embarrassing relations who are prepared to sell their stories to the tabloids. It helps if the freak-star is working-class and lacks the means or confidence to question or challenge the freakshow system. Then the freak-star should have outbursts of unacceptable behaviour – the sort of outbursts any of us might have if watched round the clock and required to perform for cameras that follow every move. The more polite freak-star will recognize the outburst as misconduct, subside into tears and apologise. The badly-behaved freak-star defends her or his conduct and can be held up for further contempt.
Any freak-star who attacks the system is blamed. Good, pliant, commendable freak-stars talks of their “journey” and praise the system. The reward is more TV exposure. Occasionally the freak-star achieves financial gain, though this is usually short-term.
Sometimes a freak-star tries to trick the system – or is incited to trick the system – by falsely representing a past as tragic or impoverished. You can't become a freak-star without overcoming illness, grief, abuse or addiction. You have to make your exploiters cry for the cameras – so long as they don't smudge their carefully-applied make-up.
But if you lie to elicit those much-needed tears, the tabloids and public will turn on you. They want authentic suffering, a real journey – and you mustn't deceive them. If you do, they'll turn away from you at once. There's always another outlandish figure or group to hate, despise or pity. The trickster who tries to exploit the freakshow system is condemned to isolation. The TV companies and their bosses rake in their millions.
And the audience stays smug in a contempt which provides warm insulation from most of the pain in the world.
Growing up in our block of flats, there were always small tasks for children. I had slim, flexible wrists and was in demand whenever a neighbour accidentally let the front door slam behind her and found that she was locked out. I could slide my fore-arm through the letter-box and, using a hooked kitchen utensil, pull the inside door handle down until the door opened again. Sometimes I'd be offered sixpence as a reward but I was sufficiently well-schooled by my parents to refuse it, unless the neighbour was particularly existence. Helping out was a way of life.
Often someone would run out of a basic food. I would be given a cup to ask the neighbours if we could borrow flour or sugar, with the promise to return it the next day. Back then, the shops shut at 5.30 and shopping was a daily activity. Best of all was running out of milk. Only one of our neighbours had a fridge and borrowing milk meant drinking milk that was icy instead of room temperature or, in a hot summer – and despite our efforts to cool by evaporation in a sink full of water – not far from going off.
I don't recall envying the wealthier neighbours. I enjoyed the excitement of rummaging through jumble sales for books, ornaments and clothes (my order of priorities). I would have liked a holiday and wished my mother could have better shoes – but she insisted her canvas plimsoles were comfortable and children are apt to take parents' reassurances at face value. Mum did her best to convince us that holidays were boring, though Butlin's sounded terrifically exciting. Instead we had Sunday school outings and days out roaming Putney Heath, Richmond Park and Wimbledon Common. Sometimes we walked as far as Kew Gardens or took advantage of our cheap tube fares to explore London's (mostly free) sights and museums. There were always books, libraries and sometimes theatre trips to Shakespeare in the parks or plays, musicals and ballet from the gods of the nearby theatres.
As a small child I observed and marvelled at all kinds of glamour: I remember golden beehive hairstyles, possibly tinted by the hairdresser, and stiletto heels. One neighbour invited us for drinks at Christmas and we sat nervously in her pristine living room where she offered a choice of tea, squash and Bristol cream. (Mum disapproved of the sherry - she thought it the first step to alcoholism). Usefully, one neighbour acquired a telephone and gave us all his number for use in emergency. We were instructed in the routine of the phone box – when to press button A and button B – and learnt to deliver a quick message in ten seconds should we depend on the return of twopence for the bus fare home. The telephone and fridge-owner even had a small car. He worked as a chauffeur and once, resplendent in his chauffeur's uniform, gave me a lift into central London. I'll never forget how he stood and saluted as I emerged from his small grey morris minor.
I suppose we were still in the post-war atmosphere and believed we were “all in it together,” whatever “it” was. Linked by our need for council houses, we were a surprising jumble of people: young couples with children, older people, respectable types who had lost homes in the war, ex-servicemen and women, refugees (some with numerical tattoos we didn't mention), people with shady pasts. There was a loving father who occasionally vanished into jail for a few months. One glamorous woman was said to be “on the game” but “a very good mother..” There were loving marriages and couples who fought. Being a child, I probably missed a great deal – it was more exciting to explore “the woods,” “the bomb-site,” to “go trespassing” and to dream of the big adventure of going down the steps of the underground air-raid shelter. I needed occasional risks - children do when they feel secure.
I still visit my parents in the council estate where I grew up. I don't get there often enough and these days I feel like an outsider. The atmosphere has changed – we're no longer in the post-war world, in which progress was taken for granted. At some point during my childhood a council house ceased to be a badge of respectability and “council tenant” became a term of abuse. Perhaps the upper middle classes needed someone new to fear and despise. Or perhaps they always did fear and despise people like me and I didn't know it. I remember the rants in the press about the evils of tower blocks - I loved and still love the high-rise block in which I lived – and the new acquaintances who examined me for evidence of neurosis or criminality, if they didn't (as some did) cut me dead on discovering where I lived. At around that time, people on the estate seemed to lose a certain self-confidence. It didn't help to know that an address might disqualify you for a desired job. I was assured, by people who didn't know my background, that council tenants were stupid, ignorant and never read books, went to museums or walked in London parks. I was told that people like me were vandals, racists, criminals and scroungers who didn't care to know right from wrong. The transition from home to wider society was uneasy. I learnt to keep quiet about my background and to mimic the nonchalance of the rich.
There was a shortage of council homes in London. For a while councils bought up big houses in wealthy areas and converted them into flats. Then the policy changed. Under Mrs Thatcher, tenants were encouraged to buy, at a substantial discount, and councils were not allowed to spend the proceeds on further council homes. We were to become a home-owning society. My parents, who had paid more than the value of their flat to the council in thirty years of renting, took advantage of the discount and used Dad's redundancy pay to buy their flat. While the policy as a whole seemed dodgy, I was glad for them. There were voices on the extreme right of the tory party suggesting that tenants with spare rooms should be moved. After bringing up a son and a daughter in a 2-bedroom flat, Mum and Dad finally had a little extra space – a room where their children and, eventually, their grandchildren, could bed down for the night.
There's more to that flat than extra space. Mum and Dad, who are still there and approaching their nineties, know the neighbours. They visit a familiar GP and are greeted by adults who remember Mum from the days she worked as an infant helper at the local primary school. The bus drivers recognize and lower the platform on the bus so that Mum can get on without difficulty. The views are the familiar views of Richmond Park. It's changed a little from my childhood by storms and the fall of trees. There are no longer sheep in the park and I don't know if the parrots who arrived in the 1980s survived the last harsh winter. But you can still hear the bark of foxes at night and the rough call of rutting stags. Sometimes you can look down on a hawk as it stoops for prey. When I stay there in summer I'm often woken by the rowdy clamour of the dawn chorus. It all brings back memories – memories cherished by my parents who have now lived there more than fifty years.
The sale of council houses brought changes, of course. Flats were the least popular part of the council's housing stock. It wasn't just the contempt in which tower-block dwellers are held which caused that. Anyone buying a flat has to contribute to maintenance, repairs, renovations and upgrades for the block as a whole – my parents had to put money aside for bills which can run into thousands or tens of thousands. So far they've managed. They are secure in their home with their memories.
Other neighbours bought, then sold and moved away. Tenants died and were replaced with new tenants. Suddenly individual and families on the council house waiting list needed more than inadequate housing to qualify and reach the head of the list. Desperation helped. So did illness or personal disaster. The shortage of council houses made it harder for relatives to live near one another – grown-up sons and daughters sometimes stayed as tenants or carers but many found themselves driven from London. I have a four-hour journey each way when visiting my parents and that's not unusual. I still feel comfortable on the estate. The sight of library, maisonettes and tower blocks among the trees tells me I'm coming home.
Now even faster change is arriving. It sounds as though the Big Society will mean higher rents, lower income for people on housing benefit (some of whom work at several jobs for low wages) and insecure tenancies. People who can't find work for a year will be punished by a cut in housing benefit, although their housing will be no cheaper. Rents are set to rise to 80% of the private equivalent rent – and in London that will be high if the housing shortage continues to contribute to landlords' profiteering.
It all worries me but it's the insecurity that nags at me most. If council houses are allotted only for a short period and, as has been suggested, those who are luckier with pay or promotion are rewarded with eviction, there will be no chance for a mixed community to grow. At the same time, the jobless – and the latest projections suggest unemployment is about to rise by 1.6 million – may also be punished by eviction as their housing benefit falls. Will they join the council outposts in Slough or Hastings, where cheaper landlords are said to be offering bulk bed-and-breakfast accommodation for the needy and homeless?
If all this happens, children growing up now on the council estate where I lived will never have the secure childhood I had. Their parents will take less pride in their homes as they wait to be moved on. If they are cautious and anxious they will save any spare pennies and pounds for the cost of the move and the demands of the next home. They will hesitate to root themselves in a community of temporary dwellers. Schools and doctors will see pupils and patients who pass through and never settle for education or care.
I'm concerned for all who live on the estate where I was so happy. I fear that these policies will swell a tide of anger and despair, leading at times to wide, directionless anger. I know how I feel when my security is threatened – and how my anger is trebled when those I love are at risk.
I fear that my parents, who still take pride in their flat and its views, will wake one morning to find themselves marooned in a transit camp for the poor.
The photos say it all. The 19th century maids may be wearing caps and aprons - even carrying a kettle to show their "service" - but they are dressed in their best for the picture. They gaze out, confidently or nervously, holding the required pose before resuming their complex, interesting lives. They are hard-working women whose leisure activities and concerns for friendship and family cannot be shown in this photo.
If a 19th century photo can show women domestic workers as human beings, why do writers in the 21st century still get it so wrong?
I've been listening, casually, to the P.D. James serial on Radio 4. Perhaps it's more accurate to say that I don't turn it off. It follows The Archers and Front Row and I leave the radio on so that I can catch the 8.00 p.m. news headlines.
The serial is one of the later novels featuring James's posh, poetic detective Adam Dalgliesh. I used to read P.D. James. She created an early woman private investigator and I liked the idea of combining crime and poetry. Buit gradually P.D. James' take on class began to grate on me. In the end I couldn't bear to read her any more. The radio serial has reminded me just what is wrong with her writing.
The victim in this serial is a politician - posh and sensitive like James's detective. But the investigation, as usual, means interviewing the servants. The other evening an entire episode featured an interview with the victim's cleaner.
I had to listen. The first thing I learnt was that the cleaner lived in a council flat - just like my mum, who also worked as a cleaner. When I was growing up I knew lots of cleaners who lived on the estate. (For the benefit of P.D. James, that's a council estate, not the kind of estate owned by the landed gentry.) I enjoyed their conversation about their employers - it was gossipy and satrical. The wealthy employers were good material for a laugh, before talk moved onto more serious topics: politcs, family, books, television, etc.
Of course, the cleaner created by P.D. James was there for a purpose - to provide a clue to the mystery. But upper and middle-class characters in James' mysteries have complex lives and face ethical dilemmas. The cleaner didn't. She was called Mrs Minns - such a stock name for a domestic worker that it's also used by Enid Blyton in the first of her Famous Five books. And listening to the interview with Mrs Minns, as created by P.D. James, I longed for the ethical complexity of Enid Blyton.
Mrs Minns was not a character with a credible independent existence. She was an attribute of her employer - her role was to admire him. It was impossible to believe there had ever been a Mr Minns because people who get married are human beings with human emotions and Mrs Minns was a cardboard cut-out. (I've seen cardboard cut-outs who are more convincingly human.)
Mrs Minns' role involved the discovery of a book. It was, of course, a trashy romance with a lurid cover. My mum's favourite authors include Dickens, Shakespeare, Moliere, Plato, Borges and late 20th century magic realists - but that would be too much complexity for P.D. James to handle. Cardboard cut-out cleaners don't enjoy literature or art or think about politics - they leave that to real cleaners.
By the end of the episode I was angry. How could the BBC perpetuate this travesty of characterisation - this lack of literary imagination?
Before blogged about it, I had to be sure that it mattered. So I thought it through.
It matters that we see other human beings as complex individuals. Seeing people as cardboard cut-outs is dangerously close to seeing them as sub-human. If people are treated as sub-human, no-one will care what happens to them. We're already close to that when thinking of people on council estates. The government is threatening to move families out of their council homes, as a punishment for being unemployed or being too successful. This policy assumes that people in council estates aren't attached to their homes, communities or schools - are mere units who don't matter and can be moved around the country for political convenience. (But I, my brother and my parents were not sub-human. We loved our council-flat home.) P.D. James' fictions feed into current anti-working class prejudice and policies.
P.D. James is also in a position of power. She has been a magistrate. She has been a governor of the BBC. As Baroness James of Holland Park (an unelected member of the House of Lords) she is a lawmaker - she speaks and votes on matters that affect the people she fails to see as complex, interesting individuals.
Mrs Minns is not just a failure of literary skills. She's a failure of human understanding. She shows that P.D. James' grasp of ethics is dangerously narrow.
The first vote I cast was for a communist. It was in the Greater London Council elections of 1973.
Back in those days, I had great hopes of elections. I attended the public meetings - there were several and they were packed. I interrogated canvassers about their beliefs. I met the candidates as they campaigned in shopping centres and asked my questions. In that first election, I didn't make up my mind till just before polling day. I never agonised so much about a vote till 1997, when an encounter with Tony Blair finally persuaded me that I couldn't vote New Labour.
Back in 1973, there were four candidates. I can't remember who the Tory was. Records name a Mrs Williams. The Labour candidate was Marie Jenkins, wife of the MP standing in what was then a safe Labour seat. I didn't consider voting Liberal as I'd never met the candidate, Walter Hain. (Later I came to know, like and respect him and his wife, especially for their opposition to apartheid which cost them so much.) The communist candidate was called Dave Welsh.
I must have wanted to vote Labour because I sought out Marie Jenkins and asked her about her policies. Perhaps she thought I was younger than I was or perhaps I took her manner the wrong way. I can't remember what she said but I burned with shame at what I read as her condescension. In my memory, which may be false, she is wearing a fur coat - not necessarily real fur - and was visiting the council estate in a large car. I am certain she didn't take my earnestness seriously. I was eighteen and very intense. And I'd come across several people who assumed council tenants were stupid and criminal. I saw no reason to vote for someone who saw me, on the evidence of my address, as an inferior.
Dave Welsh was different from the other candidates. He lived in a council flat and, like my dad, worked for London Transport. When he spoke, he spoke with knowledge and experience about council housing and public transport. He also spoke approvingly of the Soviet Union, suggesting things were much better there. I wasn't convinced about Russia - films of tanks on the streets of Prague in 1968 suggested a grey oppression far from the optimism of the Communist Manifesto. But the Greater London Council wasn't concerned with foreign policy. I cared about council housing and public transport. I wanted a councillor who would speak with knowledge on behalf of other working people. I voted for Dave Welsh and, for a few hours, hoped that enough other people would vote as I did. He didn't win.
Communist councillors and councils are pretty rare in Britain. It's different in France. My friends in France have communist councillors and, when I last visited, I saw their announcements of a forthcoming communist barbeque in the public square.
As a non-tenant and non-voter, I was a little hesitant about turning up. I also realised that, in France, there wouldn't be anything for me to eat. But I could at least see what a communist barbeque looked like.
I arrived too early, just as they were setting up, but the communists didn't look intimidating. They were busy cooking sausages and dispensing cans of drink. I'd hoped there would be a sale of badges or stickers so that I could find a gift for my son but there was nothing like that. Instead there were leaflets advertising the latest communist initiatives: sales of fruit and vegetables at fair prices.
The French communist party has formed an alliance with some French farmers who, like British farmers, complain that they are forced to sell their produce at low prices so that it can be sold on at a high price in the shops. Communist leaflets suggest that, as a result, fruit and vegetables are becoming a luxury. The Communist response was simple and practical: they were transporting 60 tonnes of fruit and vegetables from the countryside and selling them at 100 stalls in the Paris area. The aim was fairer pay for the farmers and cheaper produce for hard-up Parisiens. Apparently they do this regularly.
I was impressed. My local councillors may hold surgeries, but they don't hold public barbecues in the High Road. Instead of helping small farmers make a living, they agree planning permission for yet another large supermarket and tell their angry electors that it's all for their good.
My French still isn't great but I managed a conversation with some of the communists. Mostly we compared rising prices in France and Britain. I remember that I characterised New Labour as "Les Pseudo-Travaillistes", speaking of the government's current fondness for big business. A communist ventured the opinion that Sarkozy and Thatcher were the same. I think I can detect differences but I saw his point. Anyway, my French wasn't up to a more detailed discussion.
I looked at the prices on the list of fruit and vegetables for sale. They were definitely cheaper than the supermarket. And they seemed to have a lot of nectarines. I'm allergic to nectarines. In any case, the sales were meant for the local people and I was getting ready to go home.
The trains ran smoothly and it was easy to get a seat on the tube. I paused at the second-hand bookshop near Putney Bridge Station. "Only one book," I told myself, lingering at the shelves of £1 paperbacks. Then up the stairs to Putney Bridge.
Whenever I climb the stairs, I remember the days when the block by the staircase used to be a public lavatory - ladies upstairs and gents downstairs. There were tow signs on the bridge. The top sign said "GENTS' LAVATORY" and the sign below added the command, "Cyclists - please dismount." The public lavatory was sold off with so many local assets. It's not a lavatory any more but sells expensive coffee and cakes. Somehow memories from my childhood deter me from purchasing espressos there, but it's probably a good cafe.
I waited a while for the bus, then swung myself up to the top deck for the views. The Thames was a-glitter in the sunlight. Diamond-sharp points of light quivered and dissolved into brown foam as new gleams appeared. St Mary's Church looked small given its significance in history ... but when it hosted the Putney Debates in 1647, England was a small, insignificant nation. It was the ideas that mattered. I wanted to get off the bus and see the exhibition, and visit the small farmers' market, but I didn't have time. I was on the way to see my parents.
The bus journey was far longer than I'd expected - probably a side-effect of the crucial football Fulham-Birmingham football match - and I eventually got tired of looking at familar sites, even in the warm sunshine. It was good to see the familiar exterior of the Spotted Horse, even though the interior now serves a richer, less friendly clientele than I remember. I regretted the passing of the elegant Christian Science reading room, which I'd often admired but never entered. And then I fell into a half-doze until the bus swung into Roehampton village and from there into Danebury Avenue and the Alton Estate.
So many people think they know what council estates look like. Outsiders see council estates on the TV and associate them with violence, danger, drug abuse and teenage pregancy, as though these things were confined to certain areas and classes in the country. Even people who live on council estates are encouraged to see themselves and their families and their homes in this way.
There are signs of poverty on the Alton Estate. Shops are closing there as they are everywhere else and the metal shutters are a depressing reminder of fear and misery. Changes made in the past thirty years have often ignored the design of the estate, which won praise and prizes for good reason. The bungalows, flats and maisonettes are set on grassy slopes among grass and trees and, when I got off the bus, I smelt the familiar scent of mown grass and heard a bird calling. Squirrels were chasing among the trees.
It takes less than five minutes to walk from the bus-stop to the block of flats where my parents live and I grew up. I took my camera out to record the scene.
It looked like home.
