For the past month I have been glued to the BBC’s Why Poverty? season — ‘part of an unprecedented collaboration between public service media in which 37 EBU members have been dedicating multiplatform programming on the theme of poverty’.
No, I jest. What I’ve actually been watching is MasterChef. Served with a MasterChef reduction, a smear of MasterChef purée, MasterChef shavings, MasterChef pickles and MasterChef tapenade and pommes, style Masterchef. With more MasterChef for pud, obviously.
Does this make me a bad person? Well, possibly. But it also makes me a normal person. I didn’t watch any of the Poverty stuff because, frankly, the very last thing I need after another rubbish day toiling away in front of my screen for next to no money is to sit watching poor people being poor and, worse, being made to feel as though their plight is somehow my fault which, I’m sorry, it’s not and I don’t see why the BBC has any business using my licence fee to tell me that it is.
MasterChef, on the other hand, makes me feel not necessarily much better about myself but at least quite pleasantly numbed.
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