Watching hungry kids is an ugly form of entertainment

So Channel 4's Breadline Kids are the 'innocent' victims. But what about the working adults trapped in a cycle of poverty?



You've had Breadline Britain and Benefits Street; welcome to Channel 4's Breadline Kids: all the poverty that's fit to screen, with people who, being younger, are much cuter than your average indigents. They're hungry, and they describe what that's like; it's horrible to hear. One of them has cancer. The only way it could be worse is if hungry kittens could talk.

Empathy is like fear, and Breadline Kids is like a horror movie. You see the kid; you imagine your own kid, hungry; you're flooded with an anxiety that you can't shift. Then the other half of this experience, the bit that qualifies it for entertainment, floods in – sheer relief that it's not real. It's not your kid. Your kid can eat what it likes. And maybe that will spur you into an on-the-spot charitable donation, and maybe the kid who is hungry will take your voyeurism as a price they're happy to pay for "awareness". But a real child's suffering has been used instrumentally for an entertainment payoff that doesn't differ hugely from the one in Saw III.

The ugliness and shame of this rests entirely with the political class that created the situation. The benefit delays driving food bank use can only be deliberate, deployed by a particular party to destroy the safety net of social security for long-term political purpose. I reject collective responsibility. I despise the idea that these mean times have made us all meaner. Even if you voted Conservative, this is not your fault, since that sure as hell wasn't in their manifesto: "strategic incompetence in the arena of delivering benefits".

More broadly, there are two manoeuvres in the poverty debate that distort the picture, whether it's on television or not. The first is to ringfence everything into a type of poverty – "food poverty", "fuel poverty", "child poverty", "housing poverty". These are all the same poverty. It would be near impossible to find a household containing child poverty that didn't also struggle to heat itself. The framing is evasive, directing conversation away from the fundamental question – why can't working people afford the basic stuff that they need? – towards mechanistic answers: energy companies did x when they should have done y; food inflation did z because of crop yields somewhere a long way away. Then small, unimaginative policies are unveiled to answer each individual problem as though it were entirely unrelated to everything else.

The second is this insistence on children as the true victims, the authentically needy, around whom we can gather in truly bipartisan fashion, agreeing apolitically how sad their plight is. Say what you like about kids, they are definitely innocent; nobody could say they weren't trying hard enough. The unspoken corollary to the sentimentalised innocence of childhood is that adulthood is guilt. Who in their right mind would pity a grown adult who is free to get a better job any time he chooses?

Childhood, furthermore, is malleable time, and therefore a vulnerable one – a hungry child won't learn, will never make up the disadvantage, will never realise his or her potential. Again, there's a tacit flipside, which is that adults are past their formative years so it doesn't matter whether they're hungry or not. This is a productivity model of human value: people shouldn't go hungry, because it interrupts the maximisation of their value proposition.

Poverty is more easily told through the eyes of a child. No audience wants to have to fight their way through piercings, or bingo wings, or raw human rage at the injustice of it all, to see the person underneath. When its victims are appealing, the answers to hunger are pretty obvious – launch an appeal. To underline that charity is the point of the programme, it offered some international comparison: in Spain, they donate 118,000 tonnes of supermarket food; in France, 100,000 tonnes; in Italy, 72,000 tonnes; in Poland 64,000 tonnes. Here in the UK, we give just 5,900 tonnes.

So you see, it's really not very different to afternoon drinking. All we have to do is emulate the continent, and our problems will evaporate. This philanthropic solution has a huge amount going for it – it's not complicated; it sounds doable. Where it falls down is that it surveys the bi-weekly humiliation of hundreds of thousands of people and, rather than asking why, cooks up ways to improve their range of nonperishable items. Corporate sponsors get involved. Supermarkets and cereal manufacturers tell you how many breakfast clubs in schools they support. Normally, corporations run a mile from controversy, will do anything not to be associated with a feel-bad story. When they're happy to hitch their wagon to hungry children, that means hungry children are no longer political; they have become, like ill children, tragic facts of life.

Robert Peston wrote a short analysis of a report by the National Institute for Economic and Social Research, which showed this week that child poverty targets for 2020 would not be met. Everybody already knew this. It's been clear since 2010 that the government disputed their value and had no intention of meeting them. Two things stood out nonetheless – the first is that 5% target for absolute poverty, which will be missed by 19 percentage points. One quarter of children, by these estimates, will be in absolute poverty in six years' time.

The second thing is that, in Peston's words, "a more buoyant jobs market on its own would not be remotely sufficient to do what is required". Full-time work is no match for poverty: wages aren't high enough. In the noughties, the government made up the difference with tax credits; the coalition is happy to see how long people can survive on tinned tomatoes. Neither of these approaches the question: what is the point of a jobs market in which huge columns of workers aren't earning enough to feed themselves? We're not going to find the answer in the wisdom of children.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/10/breadline-kids-channel-4-hungry-adults-poverty

Is this what our country and our television has come to?   Never ending programmes about the poor?   Shameful, utterly shameful. Both the proverty and the programmes.

Reality programmes in general suck. I never watch the stupid things.

Raggamuffin wrote:Reality programmes in general suck. I never watch the stupid things.

You have a point there,

That was the point Stephen King was making when he wrote the story Running Man; that one day we'd all be watching people dying in front of eyes for pure entertainment value.

Well I wouldn't say that showing a programme highlighting hungry kids is stupid...we need to be aware of such serious matters as should all governments, something long term needs done, and not just a once dip in the pocket as Sassy's article says.

We have become meaner, but then so have many governments ...it's up to everyone to try to stamp out starvation for kids...
For everyone.

But this will most likely happen sadly.

Rags, what was really off IMO , this is kids ffs.


I'd much rather watch this than that Teeny X factor programme, load of shit.

Joy Division wrote:Well I wouldn't say that showing a programme highlighting hungry kids is stupid...we need to be aware of such serious matters as should all governments, something long term needs done, and not just a once dip in the pocket as Sassy's article says.

We have become meaner, but then so have many governments ...it's up to everyone to try to stamp out starvation for kids...
For everyone.

But this will most likely happen sadly.

Rags, what was really off IMO , this is kids ffs.


I'd much rather watch this than that  Teeny X factor programme, load of shit.

Teeny X Factor? I don't think I've seen that. I don't watch the X Factor any more because it all got too personal re the contestants. I want to see if they can sing, I don't need to know their life story.

Kids made hungry by the last govt who couldn't spend it fast enough and who gave far too much to people like Phil again (Benefit fraudster extraordinare) instead of the really needy.

You can't create the economic mess Labour did without this hardship. The coalition have a least got a growing economy sadly you and Red Ed want to contract it again.

::smthg:: ::smthg:: ::smthg:: ::smthg:: 

Glad you haven't an answer Sassy it would have been wrong again.

You mean you think an answer is actually required to that load of tosh? Give over!

Well did Labour not leave a huge deficit.

Did they not spend it as fast as it came in?

Did they not grow the public sector beyond the ability of the country to sustain?

I realise you are innumerate so I don't bother with the numbers but I'm sure you understand simple economics you can't sepnd every penny and open the taps so much we are in the shit if there is a slight downturn.

Truly if you want thick then you are it's leader. Even faced with the facts you deny them. Indeed you continued with the mantra spend spend spend and said we should do as France did or are you denying that as well?

Do you ever own up to your lies or are you addicted to lying???

Oh Drinky, you just love making yourself look like a misogynist thug don't you. Then again, it's not about looking like one, you are one.