By Abi Pollock.
Personal crusades may not be solution to England’s housing shortage but a genuine class-based movement is. The Channel 4 documentary, George Clarke’s Council Housing Scandal, which aired on the 100th anniversary of the enactment of the Addison Act (Channel 4, July 31st), has attracted a lot of attention from socialist viewers. In much the same way as Jamie Oliver politicised school dinners – state-backed food – Clarke is aiming to publicize council houses, state-backed building, or the lack of them. Although the opening pilot follows a winning formula for good TV, it may not crack the formula for how to build homes for the homeless.
There are many things for the average socialist to love in this heartfelt paean to homes. George Clarke is an enormously engaging TV presenter who has made a speciality out of architecture with a social conscience in Amazing Spaces. Hitherto, he has been involved in restoring old town halls and broken bedrooms with architectural flair. Above all, in TV terms, he is the genuine article, a proper working class boy “done-good”.
What soon became apparent was his authentic connection to the subject. Clarke is no ‘mockney’ pub owner’s son, and he has little in common with Kirsti & Phil’s, “your house is a business”, approach. George loves Dr Addison’s “homes- for heroes” and he jumps for joy when he returns home to his childhood estate. Returning to Washington, a County Durham overspill town, he bounds upstairs to his old bedroom and sighs “this council house was my castle”.
The documentary points the blame for England’s housing crisis at Thatcher and the abandonment, from the 1980 Housing Act onwards, of government-led housing schemes. However, the boldness of Clarke’s assertion that 100,000 houses a year is an easy fix; addressing the fact that council tenancies have fallen to 2.5 million; since a highpoint of 6-7 million in the late 70s; has to be examined.
Instead we get an enjoyable romp through the social housing sector of the last 130 years, even managing to throw in the LCC’s ground-breaking Arnold Circus before conflating it with post-war New Towns Act of 1946. However, housing is a subject with a bit more bite than Jamie’s School Dinners; or Hugh Fearnley-Whittingsale saving battery chickens and cod in Hugh’s Fish Fight; and at times it was hard to keep up with the barrage of ideas.
Clarke ranges from an incisive analysis of the impact of right-to-buy – his Mum did it, – to a look at how Permitted Development Rights are allowing companies such as Caridon to convert office blocks into temporary housing units. We meet Asda Car-Park Dad, a man forced to live with his four dependents in his car to avoid a nine-hour daily commute to Ealing, and then Angry Teen Dad, who railed against being forced to live in a shoe-box before admitting he’d just nabbed a 2-bed house in Essex. By part 3 I was beginning to wonder if this scandal was more about 21st Century problems and 20th Century nostalgia than current-day solutions. Finally, Clarke got down to business, in the last 15 minutes we were treated to lots of Lego, Sharpies, Blu-tack and bar charts and gorgeous George set down to an anvil and began to do draught-y things. We were finally beginning to get an insight into the scale of his ambition or maybe his prowess as a TV presenter.
Channel 4 has good form in terms of TV with a social-conscience, documentaries masquerading as lifestyle programmes which hook you in with style. So we got a glimpse of utopia in the home of Karl-Marx Hof in Vienna (pictured above). Our blue-eyed boy emerged tanned and dripping from a pool in a penthouse before getting into a sauna paid for by guess who – the City Council. Segway to an interview with the outgoing Housing Minister no one has ever heard of, James Brockenshire, and I began to realise that I was in fact watching exactly the same format as Jamie’s School Dinners. By the end you are sitting on your chair rooting for the poor, rooting for George, rooting for his plan to turn a crap car-park (another one not the ASDA one but one donated by Manchester City Council) into a cutting edge Eco-Estate. Only after the credits and production logo do you start to wonder if he really can pull it off.
The genius of the programme is that it appeals to all our nostalgic socialist sentiments and then hits you with the modern. Just like Jamie before, George has a campaign, and it comes with a website and a hashtag. It’s a simple recipe and an even simpler media campaign: build 100,000 homes a year and by 2045 we will have replaced a 1/3 of what has been lost.
Finally, it seems that everyone who clicks on the website; and donates to the campaign is a winner and every viewer is involved. This TV philanthropy, Comic Relief style, giving from a comfy armchair, may just be a new spin on George Peabody but it’s certainly a salve for the conscience of those who will never require social housing.
Somehow, I am left with the feeling that the housing revolution will not be televised. https://www.councilhousescandal.co.uk/ – to join the campaign
August 12, 2019
Programmes available on Channel 4 website here.
