Society
Cristina Odone praises the new Lady Bountifuls
Published 13 January 2003
Lady Bountiful is dead. Long live Jamie Oliver and Lord Puttnam!
Listen to this heart-warming tale and you will forget all your prejudices about nasty media folk. Barely a year ago, Ryan Bell had dropped out of school and was hanging out with young thugs whom only Derry Irvine would want to keep out of jail. Today, the 15-year-old black youth is a model student at Downside, a Catholic boarding school.
Ryan owes it all to Trevor Phillips. The broadcaster owns Pepper, a television production company that is financing (and chronicling) Ryan's Pygmalion-like transformation. Call it offering an underprivileged boy a "second chance" (the title of Pepper's film, to be shown this spring by Channel 4), or call it a voyeuristic social engineering experiment. But how can you fault the result? Someone who would otherwise be "socially excluded" now engages with others, and excels among them.
A similar social experiment has been carried out on our screens by another media mogul - Jamie Oliver. The Naked Chef plucked 15 out-of-work youngsters from their dismal lives on the dole, brought them into the kitchen of his new co-operative restaurant, and turned them into cooks capable of concocting tartes Tatins and asparagus souffles. And what of Lord (David) Puttnam, film producer of Chariots of Fire and The Killing Fields, who now chairs a body that funds worthy education schemes for the underprivileged?
Once upon a time, this kind of philanthropy would have been the exclusive preserve of the toffs who saw their responsibility as giving handouts to the deserving poor. But if yesterday's Lady Bountiful was a duchess, today's is more likely to be a media personality; our great and good have expanded to include the media-ocracy as well as the aristocracy.
More important, it reveals that the welfare state, which was supposed to have replaced Lady Bountiful, has failed. We have lost confidence in its ability to educate, and improve the well-being of, our most needy citizens. We - or at least our media moguls - now feel we must step in to get things moving. The new Lady Bountifuls may look down their noses and sound as self-righteous as their predecessors. But the results of their charitable efforts are impressive - and it all makes for great television, too.
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