Television
No home comforts
John Diamond
Television might not, like pop, eat itself, but when the best way Channel 4 can find of highlighting the housing crisis is to stage it as a TV game show (Come on Down and Out, Tuesday, 8.00 p.m.), you know that it has at least started taking nib- bles out of its own rump. The idea was that a group of derelicts competed in apt, if tasteless, games to win a splendid suburban home, and most of the commentators seemed to miss the point. Weeks ago the word went out that the show was on the way without any accompanying word that it was a staged spoof using actors in the parts of the homeless. The general response was that this was a sick way of treating the homeless. Had the game been for real, this would have been fair comment. When, a week or so ago, the obvious point was made that, low as television has sunk, it would not sink so low as that, the press regrouped and announced that the satire was in some way even sicker than the real thing and Channel 4 should be ashamed of itself.
The more obvious point still, of course, is that if TV stations really want to do their propagandising bit for the homeless — and Come on Down and Out was part of a whole TV special on homelessness — then they could find a better place to do it than on the minority channels. They'd stand a better chance of getting any given point across by taking Coronation Street or East- Enders out of the schedule for a few nights and running the good cause stuff in their places. Indeed, if television really wanted to make an immediate difference to the homeless statistics they could simply turn the estates on Coronation Street, EastEn- ders, Brookside and — given the regular pop press stories about the Costa del Scrounge — Eldorado over to their respec- tive local housing associations. I looked in on Eldorado for the third time since its dismal opening episode and it looks like the scripts have caught up with the news that the place is closing down. The whole plot — and I use the term in its loosest sense — involves the characters hanging around in beach-loungers reading flown-in copies of the Daily Mail and telling each other how Spain isn't what it used to be, and how for two pesetas they'd be on the plane back tomorrow. Or, using one of the few Spanish words allowed in the script even when Spaniards are speak- ing — manana.
I daily expect to see the Eldoradians appearing on the set of Neighbours where the turnover of characters is getting ever more difficult for the scriptwriters to cope with. Ramsey Street is now full of fag-ends of families left behind when parents or spouses decamped for a different soap or, as they euphemise it round here 'Gone to Brisbane'. People reappear from the dead on soap operas (witness Bobby in Dallas) but once a Neighbours character goes to Brisbane you know that their face will never again be seen in Ramsey Street. Children whose mothers have gone to Bris- bane (and who are invariably reincarnated In British panto) are shunted around between grandparents and then, when the grandparents themselves disappear, to neighbours whose characters must be changed in order to make the accommoda- tion at all convincing.
But then conviction isn't one of the driv- ing forces of Neighbours, a series in which the writers never have the stamina to sus- tain a plot line for more than 35 seconds. While a cliffhanger on Eastenders will set up a plot thread which will last a dozen episodes, you know that when the greasy hotelier disappeared into a thug's car last thing on Monday's Neighbours he was going to have talked his way out of a walloping by first thing Tuesday. The writers on Easten- ders, who have managed to spin out Arthur's unlikely dalliance with Mrs Hewitt well past any sort of dramatic legitimacy could learn a thing or two from the Aus- tralians.
Marlyn Harris returns next week
Previous page
