For the past few weeks, unnoticed by all but the most sharp-eyed critics, BBC1 has been running a Celebrate Communitarianism season. The first programmes were:
Envy of the World!!!, in which children at Great Ormond Street hospital spent a week being forcibly denied vital drug treatment. Then, in a touching scene right at the end, just as they were all on the brink of death, a big pink bunny with NHS printed all over his fur came hopping in with all the medicines and dialysis machines they needed, accompanied by Sir Jimmy Savile saying, ‘Now then, now then. As it ’appens, I have fixed it for YOU to understand why it is we have the best healthcare system in the world.’
So You Think You’re Hard Enough? sent a mixed group of 600 ‘Call of Duty’ players, Millwall fans, nightclub bouncers out to Helmand with presenter Rod Liddle to undertake a six-month tour of duty, without arms, training, air support or communications in order graphically to illustrate the indispensable role of the State when waging wars.
If You Didn’t Pay Taxes THIS Would Happen! was a gritty, 28 Days Later-style future-shock drama by Russell T. Davies showing the appalling potential consequences of a world in which earners were allowed to spend all their money on whatever they wanted. The result? Hideous Ferrari pile-ups; cocaine-fuelled orgies featuring the finest Estonian hookers; starved bands of ex-public-service employees roaming the streets desperately offering their vital diversity training and ethnic-monitoring skills to heartless private-sector workers uninterested in anything save gratifying their own selfish desires to have a nice house and send their kids to Eton.
Unfortunately, I missed them. I did, however, catch The Street that Cut Everything (BBC1, Monday), which offered pretty much more of the same.
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