Television
On the margin
Martyn Harris
In Paxos last week a silly fat Englishman pointed out to me the absence of beggars, alkies and other underclass vermin on the Loggos quayside where we sat drinking our sundowners. The Greeks look after their own, you see. Still got a sense of pride. . . . ' It was a prelude to the usual rigmarole of British moral decay, working- class idleness and declining family values (he was only on his second wife).
The first TV item I watched when I got back to England (Newsnight, BBC 2, 10.45 p.m., Tuesday) would have given him great satisfaction. The Victorian resort of Mar- gate, abandoned by People Like Us for places like Paxos, is now home to some 1,200 bed-and-breakfast families, camping out on rotting foam mattresses under the crumbling cornices of once-grand seaside hotels. At Seaton Grange 'hotel', a dappy girl called Tracey Taylor was living in a pile of dirty saucepans with two children and a third on the way — though she couldn't have been more than about 25 and was, naturally, unmarried.
For people like Mr Sundowner the Traceys of this world only get pregnant so that they can go and live in the subsidised glory of Seaton Grange, and of course Tracey was thick enough to lend him com- fort in his lunacy. 'Iss really great here,' she told the reporter between bites on her cockroach sandwich. 'We're all like one great big family. Really brilliant.' Her bloke, who was called 'Alt' and wore pim- ples and an earring and lived in a separate B&B, was asked solemnly if he thought it was irresponsible to father a child at the age of 13, or whatever he was. 'Oh, totally irresponsible,' said Alt. 'And so it seems', intoned the reporter, 'that there is danger of a spiral of dependency among the bed- and-breakfast dwellers. . . . '
Two centuries back a half-wit like Alt or Tracey would have been roughly but ade- quately employed as a hoer of turnips, just as their counterparts on Paxos find roles as cleaners of squid. But in Britain, for PLUs at least, things have moved on, and the price of mobility and freedom is the marginalisation of Tracey and Alt. To.say it is their 'fault' may be true in a heartless, absolutist way, but it is also entirely point- less. To blame her condition on some mys- terious moral deficiency and to deprive her of what support she has will never make Tracey stand on her own two feet — not
when she would have difficulty in counting her feet in the first place.
In the last of his discussion series, Nation (BBC 2, 11.15 p.m., Monday), Trevor Phillips took on the topic of political vio- lence, asking the usual ethnically mixed studio audience if it is ever justifiable to hijack airliners, assassinate politicians, blow up civilians etc. Because of the ridiculous 1988 Government order against broadcast- ing the voices of terrorist supporters, the former Ulster MP Bernadette McAliskey was reduced almost entirely to silent subti- tles. This made her usual rhetorical fallout even harder to follow than usual, though what she said in effect was that though she could not condone violence personally and would not commit violent acts, she could justify it — which seemed like classic cow- ardice to me.
Most of the audience would not support IRA violence in Ulster, though they would in far-away South Africa, which led Phillips to demand what then were the underlying principles on which violence could be sup- ported. Some said self-defence, others said `human rights', which of course opens the door to anyone with a pound of plastique and a bee in his bonnet. In the end a con- sensus did emerge around the notion of democracy: if enough people were suffi- ciently oppressed and without other recourse then there is some argument for violence. If there were enough Traceys and Alts, in other words, they could quite rea- sonably cut all our throats, take our money and in due course become heroes of democracy — so let us be grateful for the bed-and-breakfast.
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