BBC 2 to Revisit Victorian-Era Poverty in “The Slum” | RealScreenFirst off: yikes d

BBC 2 to Revisit Victorian-Era Poverty in “The Slum” | RealScreen

First off: yikes dogg!!

Second off: Maybe I’m too quick to judge, and at least there’s a show that’s not the Downton Abbey-style happy servants & wealthy central characters, and maybe it’ll be better than it seems and this short article might be very reductive, but like…a reality show where they try to simulate Victorian poverty by having participants make things like candles and then sell them in modern-day London? “artisanal hand-made candles” are a whole cottage industry now. Back then, they were just called “candles,” and they definitely would not have been purchased in the same way then that they were now, making it a pretty ineffective judge of whether or not a person living in the Victorian era could have made it on that kind of an income.

And on the larger scale, you can’t simulate the systematic injustices of Victorian poverty with a small-scale reality show. If this is what’s going to shock the nation into recognizing why welfare became necessary, it had better include a good history lesson in each episode so they know that debtors didn’t just have to sleep on an uncomfortable cot, they had to pay rent on that uncomfortable cot, putting them further in debt and perpetuating a cycle of deepening poverty that was almost impossible to get out of.

I’m being harsh on this show because there’s so much contemporary rhetoric (in the U.S. especially) about individual agency with regards to poverty; if this show does even a half-assed job of portraying the crushing inequality that kept the poor dirt-poor, it will only fuel the pulled-up-by-the-bootstraps crew to point to this show and make claims about how this is how things have “always been” and that wealth inequality is always due to the individual’s choices rather than circumstances. Not that I think this show will make a big splash in the economic inequality debate, but each individual brick counts.