Blood, Sweat and Nonsense from the BBC

This post has nothing to do with health (or maybe it does) and it has nothing to do with Sierra Leone but it does have a little to do with globalisation and development. I have put up with the constant crap that TV executives have been doling out to us over the past three years. Since Bob Geldof and his posse decided to 'make poverty history' there has been a mob of people making money out of the poverty of others in one way or other.
Last night recovering from a bout of poisoning (which I suspect was tuna-related), I settled to watch a couple of TV programmes which had been billed as educational. Firstly, there was Blood, Sweat and Takeaways a BBC documentary which claimed to expose how workers in developing countries are exploited so that Westerners can have their exotic meals. Six young Brits - four white and the two obligatory ethnic minorities were sent to Indonesia to work in a tuna factory. Olu, the black boy is expelled from the programme after a violent episode which involved breaking glass at the factory. I fully expected him to be thrown out mid-programme as production staff seem to have found a way to weed out the best young black people out of their programmes so that only the stereotypes remain. The rest of the programme continues without him and these young people proceed to catch, clean and can tuna for two days. I was hoping the education will come but it never did.
This programme failed to educate. What the programme did show us however, was how spoilt and ill-educated British youngsters are. It was sad to see that even the immigrant children had no cultural education, whatsoever. The programme left me with the feeling that I had just wasted one hour of my life which could have been better spent playing Solitaire.
Here goes BBC execs:
1. Poverty is everywhere.
2. Poor people are being exploited daily. You needn't have sent those young people to Indonesia to show that poor people are being exploited daily. All you needed to do was send them to a vegetable processing plant in the UK where illegal immigrants are employed and paid below the minimum wage because they cannot cry foul.
3. Having a toilet that flushes is not what makes you a human being. Some of what makes you human is overcoming adversities and learning to live with other people.
4. If you really want to make a programme about what it is like to live and work in a developing country, use the people of that country to show it. Unfortunately, sending 'white people' to a developing country to show injustice somehow feels like injustice.
5. Next time think about how you can help the viewer make a difference. Don't just tell her what you know that she knew already, tell her how she can make a difference in that situation.
By the way, I don't think I can be bothered to watch the episodes on producing rice and processing prawns. I'm bored already.
That's all folks. Next time, I will tell you a little about A Place in the Wild, the other programme I watched made by ITV. Another patronising pile of .....

Till then, Amiex