Introducing the BBC’s new reality TV show: Benefits Street meets The Hunger Games
Welcome to Britain. We’ve gone full dystopia.
I don’t even think Charlie Brooker could write an episode of Black Mirror this bleak
I… am speechless
what in hell?
The BBC has been casting envious glances at Channel 4′s “poverty porn” for a while – see this interview where the BBC2 controller waxes lyrical about Benefits Street, for instance.
Looking at the article, what I’m guessing has happened here is that someone is saying “let’s make a show about the working poor and how hard you have to work to make a living” and then someone else is saying “OK, that’s not very sexy though, let’s do it like The Apprentice”, and they haven’t fitted the pieces together and realised how fucking horrific and callous those two ideas sound together. Or they have and don’t care, of course, because it’s edgy.
And it fits with the nation of voyeurs, net curtain twitchers, finger-waggers and tale-tellers we seem to have become.