Television
Bin and gone
Martyn Harris
In Haringey Christmas starts not with carol-singers or cards, but with the thunder of galvanised dustbins on the front path and a rending scream from the dust-cart horn. 'A merry Christmas from your refuse team,' says the giant on the front step, thrusting his pewter-coloured face to within an inch of your own.
So what do you do? Do you point to the No Gratuities' sign on the side of his dust- cart? Do you observe that tipping is a mutually humiliating feature of a decadent price-wage nexus? Do you remind him of the times he has dropped rubbish all over your path? Do you gaze sternly into his wintry eye, wish him a merry Christmas and shut the door in his face? Of course you don't. If you have any sense you bung the man a fiver and you tell your wife how you sent him packing empty-handed.
In Cutting Edge (Channel 4, 9 p.m, Mon- day), which looked at the workings of Cam- den's bin men pre- and post-privatisation, the men were naturally of an entirely dif- ferent breed. Jim had 20 years' faithful ser- vice at the wheel of his 'Vulture' dust-cart, while Butch, the dazed and amiable loader, had 24. '1 like the open air and I like peo- ple. This job suits me down to the ground. And anyway I can't do nothing else,' said Butch, and indeed it was hard to imagine him organising the leveraged takeover of an undervalued pension fund.
The bin men saw themselves as providing a social service (chatting to lonely old grannies) and taking hair-raising risks (dis- posal of syringes from dosser's squats). They were fluent in the self-serving cant learned from generations of indulgent employers and pugnacious union leaders. Privatisation, said Jim, 'is like a family splitting up. I've worked with these guys 16 to 17 years and you get very close in a friendship sense.' . Sadly we ratepayers have become Ids Interested in happy families among our bin men and more interested in having our rubbish taken away. The old system of lob and finish' so much mourned by Jim and Butch, for instance, was an incentive to dustmen to tear through their rounds, scat- tering rubbish as they went and ignoring any item which failed to match their exact- ing definition of household waste.
Cutting Edge took an indulgent view of all this, dwelling very little on the furious householders who erupted occasionally
from their doorways to rage about refuse that had not been collected for a month. I felt sorry for big, simple Butch, who could hardly puzzle out his own notice of re- employment. I was moved by the elegiac mood of the ending, where Butch is dumped into the bin men's pool, remote from his mates of 20 years, but I wasn't so moved that I don't look forward to the same new broom in Haringey.
To be politically correct, I suppose, I should call the bin men 'hygiene opera- tives' or 'waste reclamation persons', though of course nobody really does, not even in harebrained Haringey. Political correctness is a chimera invented by con- servatives to make liberals look like loonies. In War of the Words (Channel 4, 9 p.m., Tuesday) the excellent Simon Hog- gart struggled valiantly to suggest other- wise, and that PC was 'a movement tearing through American universities — and per- haps tearing them up'. To support this large thesis there were two academics fired from different universities in obscure facul- ty rows; there was a bunch of soft-brained students sitting on a carpet who said that a phone book was as good as Moby Dick; and there was a pusillanimous professor too timid to call them idiots — but academic life was always thus.
Hoggart suggested that PC was an aspect of the 'multi-culturalism' that threatens to paralyse American civic life and undermine its Western cultural tradition. There were shots at the beginning of the luminous skyscrapers of Manhattan and portentous shots at the end of them going dark, but to replace the receding illusion of reds under the beds I suspect America will need a bet- ter bogeyman than PC.
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