Television
Future shock
Martyn Harris
In Doctors to Be this week (Monday, BBC 2, 8 p.m.), medical student Sarah Holdsworth fluffed her first-year viva by mistaking a kidney for a spleen. Other stu- dents bashfully confessed that they had only mugged up the parts of the body which came up regularly on past anatomy papers. A reasonable approach, I have always thought, when it's the Wars of the Roses you decide to leave out, but a little alarming the next time you're under the knife: 'Now I'm fairly sure this is Mr Har- ris's gall bladder, but I'm afraid I skipped that one in my finals.'
They were all bright, hard-working kids, triple A students at A level, most of whom had never failed an exam in their lives, but a third of them flopped their first-year exam, and after two years of solid grind their soft young faces were beginning to set into the grim lines of the hardened medic.
Sociologists often define the middle classes by what they call 'future orienta- tion', which is to say the ability to imagine your life ten years hence; to defer gratifica- tion; to understand the benefits of appar- ently thankless toil and to grasp the consequences of reckless or aberrant behaviour. You might say this is just anoth- er way of defining intelligence, but the vic- tims of loan sharking in this week's Cutting Edge (Monday, Channel 4, 9 p.m.) did not seem completely unintelligent. It was just that nobody had the future orientation of a tadpole.
One of these, a bearded tadpole in
glass- es, was living in a Glasgow council hostel, and had borrowed £300 at £77.50 a week interest — so he could play bingo. 'Just to set myself on my feet,' he explained; 'Bingo, bingo, bingo. Ah'm bingo mad, me. Amazinglyenough, he had a big win, which paid off the several thousand pounds that he now owed with interest, and with a. ha left over. So much for middle-class probitY. The other tadpoles were a single mother of four, an unemployed father of five and a cheery old cove, in debt for £3,000, who had decided to avoid the risk of getting Mars-barred (scarred) by shooting his own loan shark in the arm. The sharks them-
selves were hardly less pathetic, in their pilled sweaters and greasy jogging jackets, with a king shark by the name of Paul McCabe who had ascended to the dizzy heights of a 'luxury caravan' on the Clyde coast. It was the shabby preying upon the shabby; the brutal upon the brutalised.
Bruce Collier, director of Strathclyde Trading Standards, a man of steel-rimmed rectitude and bottomless patience, has the lob of hunting down the sharks under Pathetically feeble legislation. 'We should really be dealing with the sources of pover- ty. Create alternative sources of credit,' and he was right, of course. A century ago there were neighbourhood credit unions and building clubs in Glasgow, as there still are among immigrant groups. But the bright sparks who ran them have gone, sucked into the swelling middle class on the Updraft of future orientation.
On Newsnight (BBC 2, Monday, 10.30 P.m.) there was a party atmosphere as Pax- man, Wheeler and Co welcomed the apparently inevitable Clinton victory in the US elections. It is hard to see why, for the man with the roast-beef jowls and scouring- pad hairdo is hardly a liberal hero in the Newsnight mould. A Democrat who believes in the death penalty, in `workfare' over welfare and in smoking dope without inhaling it looks like a timid tinkerer in the wreckage of the Reagan binge rather than any kind of serious reformer. The chairman of the Bush campaign, Vin Weber, turned UP to explain that what the American peo- ple really wanted was 'change and activism, but conservative change and activism'. In Other words, they want gain without pain, wars without deaths, growth without tax, and omelettes without eggs — and in the essentially hollow figure of Bill Clinton they thought they might get it.
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