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15 October 2013

On Benefits and Proud: The show where ‘deserving taxpayers’ stalk ‘proud benefit claimants’

Channel Five has plumbed the depths of human decency with its latest scapegoating programme.

By Frances Ryan

Sometimes, when I want to feel better about myself, I switch on the television and judge people.

The BBC and Channel Four have both really helped with this lately, like true public broadcasters should. They’ve given me We All Pay Your Benefits, in which two people known for a show based on a fight to be the grubbiest capitalist encouraged ‘taxpayers’ to stalk ‘benefit claimants’. And who could forget Benefits Britain 49, where we inflicted misery on the sick and elderly for no real reason at all.

Still, not be beaten in tastelessness, Channel Five came in last night with a late entry: On Benefits and Proud. As the title implied, this was a show in which we tracked down people who use benefits to help them live and who weren’t feeling the necessary level of shame about it.

This was obviously televisual gold. There’s just something particularly brilliant about the poor. Ideally uneducated, definitely unemployed, and (if possible) fat and/or northern. It’s so very now, isn’t it? Because people are actually unemployed and working out how to pay the bills. Knowing that added an exciting element of reality to it all as I sat on my sofa and laughed/tweeted angrily/tweeted angrily whilst laughing at what I tweeted. 

Heather Frost, an unemployed 37 year old who has eleven children, was our central target. Sorry, interesting participant. The big news was that Heather has eleven children and the soft local council were helping them not be homeless. This was something I was sure I was meant to be terribly angry about and luckily, we saw that news of the family being re-housed was greeted with public outrage. 

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“If it was someone [dealing with this vilification] who suffered from depression they would have jumped off a cliff and killed themselves,” Heather said to the camera, as we cut to a statistic on how much single mothers were costing the taxpayer.

Admirably, the producers quickly threw out any attempt at subtlety. Annoying, fat Londoners and Scousers were rolled out, accompanied by plodding music and puns. “Their only hard graft is working the system,” trilled the narrator. “And all those kids!” we snarled in uniform with him, as if working class children were rats.

There were repeated shots of televisions and references to satellite packages, as if this was a Channel Five exclusive. People on benefits in this country are not in fact entertaining themselves with shadow puppets. You saw it here first!

The general idea seemed to be that, despite living in houses with wiring showing, everyone involved was actually bathing in benefit slips. We were shown “just how much cash they’ve got coming in!”, like…um a single mum who receives £115 a week. “It’s time to spend!” yelled the narrator, as we watched people on sickness benefit and JSA go to pay the electricity meter.

Even the producers seemed to get bored of producing banal anti-benefit propaganda at one stage, as we spent five minutes watching Heather not feed her children vegetables.

In case the audience was similarly losing it, we were repeatedly reminded both that Heather was on benefits and had eleven children. ELEVEN. ON BENEFITS. Throughout, it was unclear what the solution to this was supposed to be. Taking away their support and letting the children go hungry, or going back in time and stopping the working class woman procreating, possibly with forced sterilisation? What was clear was that, like the others, she should feel very bad about herself and she was absolutely representative of the average benefit claimant.

This was perhaps the best/worst thing about On Benefits and Proud. Like previous programmes, from the outset it was held up as a piece of analysis that was genuinely going to help us work out once and for all the complexities of social security.

It would be more honest to call them opportunities for scapegoating and give the audience some rotten veg. After all, Heather wasn’t using it to feed her eleven kids. 

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