My Saturday morning would not be complete without Amanda Platell’s delicious put-downs in the Daily Mail, usually aimed at people who richly deserve them. But today she identifies a target that doesn’t. Her piece, “White Dee, and how the Left lost the war on welfare,” argues that Ch4 made Benefits Street to “provide a powerful argument for the deserving poor” but ended up awakening a nation to the abuses of welfare. She’s wrong: Ch4 knew what it was doing. And only Ch4 would have had the guts to do it.
Benefits St was indeed a landmark in the debate; she’s right about that. But wrong to suggest that it somehow backfired on Ch4. Its documentaries are distinguished by picking controversial topics that the BBC shies away from: Ch4 lives up to its remit of challenging, rather than reinforcing, the consensus
For example, a few years ago, Ch4 commissioned a documentary entitled The Great Global Warming Swindle.
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