Slumming It
Channel 4
Golly. Gosh. Kevin McCloud couldn’t believe it. “Slum” actually meant slum, as in not a gorgeous glass cube carved into a hillside with amazing east and west aspects and an exceptionally clever vaulted ceiling which became a helipad. Slum actually meant people actually living in, and on, rubbish. Indeed, when he first gazed down on a collection of hovels in Mumbai he assumed they were bits of discarded rubbish, but they were makeshift roofs. The children played on the sewage pipes.
Yet he kept restating that there were certain architects and theorists who thought slums were the answer to some pressing problem: the worst part of Slumming It was neither this problem, nor the solution that the slums allegedly embodied, were stated. So the problem presumably is that there are lots of people who need somewhere to live in the world, particularly in cities to which people gravitate. The solution, according to these rads (most likely in their gorgeous glass cubes with bespoke ice dispensers) is slums. But why? How? Whose ideas were these? What did they propose?
Advertisement
Is the idea that you would herd a large group of people together in filthy streets, in firetrap hovels, 25 in a room, and congratulate yourself for ingenuity? The case for slum living is not obvious, and despite the immense hospitality that he was shown, McCloud didn’t make one. He may have been entranced by a street used for shopping suddenly becoming a location for mass prayer, he may also have been amazed to see that slums had shops, and that a man who had made a million still chose to live in one — ironically he made his money by overseeing the manufacture of suitcases, vessels which help people to get away to their dream destinations. But these were ingenious uses of space borne of necessity, not planned.
McCloud may also have found it astonishing that people could be clean and live in a slum (like the English- speaking girl of the family he stayed with). But none of this outweighed his understandable disgust at the crowded conditions, the lack of sanitation and privacy, the presence of rats, the sheer intensity — as he put it — of living in this 24 hours a day. McCloud spoke eloquently, if not persuasively, of the “paradox of delight and disgust” that the slums represented. “I just don’t fancy catching bubonic plague,” he said after seeing the rat scuttle about in the middle of the night.
He began rhapsodising about being near a flushing toilet and so at the end you were less convinced than ever that the slums were really anything more than that and that what they contained were desperately poor people trying to lead as normal and honourable lives as possible in awful circumstances. Though McCloud was far from patronising, part of this smacked of middle-class poverty tourism (the commentary not extending far beyond, “Crikey, isn’t this awful/ amazing?”). Wouldn’t it have been more radical to propose that McCloud and a group of architects tried to redevelop a slum? McCloud should either elaborate on or clarify why the slums present a model for future living, or torpedo what seems, after this first episode, an absurd idea dreamt up by those who would never ever live in one — except via their PowerBooks and over-active imaginations.
Material Girl
BBC One
Advertisement
Flights of fancy were also evident in the glossy BBC drama Material Girl, an hour that felt a bit like a day of blistering sunshine and horrendous hailstorm: funny then not funny; sharp, then suddenly, lamentably pedestrian. The story of a plucky young fashion designer and her evil former boss had all the Cinderella elements of Ugly Betty, the show it most obviously resembled. However, whereas the latter glorifies in its absurdity, its camp cartoonishness, Material Girl allowed Dervla Kirwan as Davina to dress up as Cruella de Vil, and snarl and scowl icily, but then the tone receded and became all workmanlike and clunky. British, in other words.
Lenora Crichlow as Ali, who had left the evil Davina to set up on her own, slugged beer from a bottle (to show she was a regular gal), she didn’t want some fancy-schmancy star to wear her dress to the Baftas (yeah right!). Her boyfriend is just a regular guy courier who rides a motorbike and who puts her, chaste and untouched, to bed after she gets hideously drunk. What a prince.
Material Girl isn’t as bad as some critics say, but it’s not as fun as it could be. It’s not really new to identify fashion as vapid and fashion people as empty, self-serving egotists. (Oh and for all the men to be bitchy, camp gays: there are not enough of them on TV, thanks!) There’s a great moment in The Devil Wears Prada where Meryl Streep tells Anne Hathaway she can pretend to be all superior about this empty world, but what about the blue jumper she’s wearing ... which Streep then deconstructs piercingly. Material Girl could be very funny, if it had a sharper, more knowing respect for the world it sets out to satirise.