Spectacle

Poking around YouTube, I stumbled upon a doc which had aired on Britain’s Channel 4 a few years ago.  An episode of a series titled How the Other Half Live, the program profiles two families, one affluent and the other poor.

In this installment, the first family is that of millionaire marketing consultant David Abington and his wife Angie.  The Abingtons live in a spacious manse in the countryside with their two young children.  The second is that of debt ridden single mom Caroline Buffery and her daughter, who live in a cramped council house.  The program’s conceit is to compare their lives whilst the Abingtons looked for ways to help the Bufferys.

How the Other Half Live points up the vicissitudes of late stage capitalism.  Mr. Abington, a truck driver’s son with a modest education, succeeded through perseverance and ability.  Ms. Buffery, who gave up an itinerant life as a “New Age traveler” after her daughter was born, earned a criminal justice degree and a master’s in law.  Unable to land a “pupillage” or apprenticeship which would qualify her as a barrister, she works in a betting parlor.  Her schooling has left her with £20,000 in debt she’s been unable to pay down, adding to her woes.

Whatever its producers intended it to be, How the Other Half Live comes out as a bizarre cross between a news documentary and a reality show. Mr. Abington said he was inspired to reach out to a financially struggling family after returning from a vacation.  Traveling in first class, Abington walked with his son George to the rear of their plane.  He said George became visibly apprehensive when they left business class and entered the economy section.

Talk about sheltered.  People living in actual poverty can’t afford air travel, and in my experience the passengers up front don’t look much different from us riffraff riding in the back.  But, never mind.  David and Angie Abington reached out to Caroline Buffery.   

David, who couldn’t place Caroline in a pupillage right away due to the enormous size of the applicant pool, hires Caroline to do legal work for him in the meantime.  Son George and daughter Rebecca become fast friends with Caroline’s daughter Iris, despite their different backgrounds.  And they all lived happily ever after. 

They all lived happily ever after, because that’s what the narrative conventions of these kind of TV shows demand.   It’s certain that this program was partly scripted as reality shows are, that any spontaneity of the subjects was calculated, and that the outcome decided before the cameras started rolling.  The question of whether the Abingtons made any lasting difference in the lives of the Bufferys is unresolved at the end of the hour.   

What is clear is that How the Other Half Live, aside from its obvious reality show tackiness, is that it is part of a long tradition of poverty porn on television.  Poor people make us feel superior, make us feel virtuous by comparison.  Being poor is shameful; in the past when I’ve let my guard down with people I’ve known a while and mentioned I grew up in poverty they would often give me a funny look as if I’d told them I had a social disease.  I’ve since learned not to mention this part of my biography.

Public discourse high and low reflects a trenchant hostility on the topic.  News and political commentary discuss the policy implications of poverty but back away from taxpayer supported anti-poverty programs notwithstanding their ideological stance.  Reading the postings of internet trolls, one can feel a nearly palpable hatred of the poor.  Very little effort is made to analyze the structural, cultural, environmental, and behavioral aspects of the problem.  It’s simpler and much more satisfying to blame the victim.

                                                                                                      

TV programming reflects our cultural attitudes, and depictions of the less well-off or just economically unfortunate cut across decades and genres.  The bathetic How the Other Half Live reminded me in its tone of still another YouTube artifact, this one hailing from television’s so-called Golden Age.  It was a game show, of all things, an installment of Queen for a Day.

Queen for a Day was a daytime show targeted at housewives which had made the leap from radio in the late 1940s and ran into the early 1960s.  It’s an appalling piece of work, perhaps even more exploitive than anything seen on contemporary American TV.   Hosted with cringeworthy smarminess by Jack Bailey, Queen for a Day would call on stage several women chosen at random.  Each would recount their financial problems and tell the host what sort of help they would like to receive from the show. 

The winner was chosen by receiving the loudest applause from the studio audience.  Seated on a throne in a crown and robe and clutching a scepter as the house orchestra played “Pomp and Circumstance,” the new Queen was presented with her prizes.  As with Caroline Buffery, we are implicitly assured that the Queen faced nothing but smooth sailing ahead of her.

This particular episode, a kinescope from 1958, is one of the very few which have survived.  True to the show's theme, the contestants each had their own awful bad luck.  One was a single mom whose husband had been killed in a hunting accident.  She wanted to return with her daughter to her family’s home in Ohio and train as a hairdresser.  Another was a military spouse who wanted to build bunk beds in her trailer for her four kids.   Still another was a mother to a bedridden polio victim in a body cast who wanted a hospital gurney so he could leave the house occasionally and a transistor radio to keep him company in his sickroom.  (And if that wasn’t enough misfortune, this lady’s husband was an invalid with a heart condition.)   

The next contestant in the misery parade was a timorous and very pregnant young woman who needed funds to buy inventory for her family's failing grocery store, which she said had a grand total of 64¢ in the till that morning.  (Upon hearing this Bailey took up an impromptu collection onstage, netting a few dollars which he presented to her with flip ostentatiousness.)  Lastly, we were introduced to a mother whose husband was unemployed and also had a bad heart and whose teenage son was crippled by rheumatic fever.  She hoped for a set of encyclopedias and a remodeled bedroom for the boy.

The recent widow was the episode’s Queen, who won a scholarship to beauty school.  The audience acclamation which chose the winner was hard to watch, particularly because I knew that these were regular people and their reactions were real.  The show used an “applause meter” to measure audience sentiment.  Each woman wore an apprehensive expression as Jack Bailey reminded the audience of their wish and awaited their share of applause.  The shopkeeper’s shoulders were visibly heaving from the deep breaths she was taking.

Queen for a Day was pure spectacle, misfortune and redemption as sadistically vicarious pleasure.  We love to see others have their dignity taken from them, as long as we don't give the objects of our contempt too much thought.  In the case of Queen, the contestants’ authenticity is plain to see and this fact adds to the discomfort of watching them share their pain with the viewing public.  The contestants came on stage in their dowdy street clothes and without stage makeup.   A couple of them were visibly wringing their hands as Bailey interviewed them, and they all either stammered nervously or spoke in such low voices that the host had to ask them to repeat themselves.

The fact that each of the women was desperate enough to pin their hopes on winning a game show, especially one with all or nothing stakes, may have overridden any humiliation they might have experienced but it doesn’t make it any more palatable to watch.  I’m actually a bit surprised contemporary TV hasn’t ventured into similar concepts, though attempts to revive Queen for a Day have been unsuccessful.  I doubt it had anything to do with the concept’s lack of subtlety; maybe it just seemed dated or needed a new gimmick to freshen it up.

Still, in a time where the social safety net is wafer thin it’s not hard to imagine equally desperate people today being willing to subject themselves to degradation in front of millions of viewers in exchange for a chance at a prize.  How the Other Half Live strikes me as a marginally more sophisticated form of this tendency.  Social media and our preoccupation with recording every trivial moment on our phones has lowered our inhibitions, though, and Millennials in particular are more willing to trade their self-respect for a little exposure, so the future evolution of these kind of programs will be interesting to follow. 

Television may have reached maturity as a medium.  But it has not lost an iota of its ability to reduce us to rubbernecking at other people’s suffering.

© 2017 The Unassuming Scholar