Phone Rage, Channel 4, Thursday
Delia, BBC2, Monday
White Girl, BBC2, Monday
10 Days to War, BBC1, Monday
It has been claimed by many in recent years that call centres are the "modern mills". The situation of workers chained to their desks by their headsets, with their loo breaks timed and having to be back at their desks literally on the second after a break, may not sound as bad as sooty-faced Dickensian orphans spluttering their way up chimneys while being pitchforked on the bum by evil Fagan types, but that’s only because you’ve never worked in a call centre.
Phone Rage (Channel 4, Thursday), brought back all those deep-repressed memories of my year in a call centre in 1999, quite literally the worst, most demoralising and most depressing job I have ever had. Doubtless my lily-livered editor will not allow me to mention the phone company I worked for during this year of hell, but suffice to say it was one of the major ones, with one of the first mobile phone networks, and one where you could ring up and find out the numbers of companies anywhere in the UK.
"Anywhere in the UK" was the problem. The contract for this had been "outsourced" to Belfast - in other words, we work cheaper over here so our wages were unlikely to cut too much into the few billion quids’ worth of profit made by Ma Bell. This meant we were not only very busy – 90 calls an hour was the average – but that every fourth or fifth call was an enraged person from Birmingham or Oxford furious that me in Belfast did not know the name of the shop next to Boots on the High Street, and so could not give them the number.
(I was called a "thick Irish bitch" quite a few times, but this just made me chortle and remember the time I asked some chavette in London whether she meant "N for November" and was told, No, n for knife, innit?. Or the time I was asked for a number in Canning Town, and then asked if I was spelling it correctly. Yes, I said, it’s my surname, so I do know how to spell it. Wot? said the amazed Cockney on the other end of the line. Your surname’s Canning Town?)
So, and very probably not what the programme makers intended the reaction to be, my rage was directed at the customers and not the call centre staff. Yes, I know it is infuriating, and I have been enraged on hold myself, but, people, it is not the fault of the poor minimum waged or studenty types on the other end of the phone. Be nice to the mill workers, everyone.
My ire was quenched somewhat by Delia Smith’s new programme on BBC2 on Monday night, quite self-confidently just called "Delia", and giving tips on how to cheat at cooking. Now, as someone whose cooking is what can most kindly be called a bit hit and miss – most of the stuff I make is passable, sometimes it’s stinking and very occasionally I manage a delicious fluke (usually when I add half a bottle of wine to whatever I have in the cauldron) – I was very interested in this, and now Deila, using tinned mince and frozen spuds for her shepherd’s pie, is my new hero.
It’s all the more amusing as it gives me even more ammunition in my "chefs are pretentious gits" rants, as I imagine the likes of Gordon Ramsay going apopoleptically purple and screaming about "f**king frozen potatoes!!" As Delia said, it’s eating. It’s fun, and important, but not that much so.
And how nice to see a cooking programme where the recipes don’t call for you to walk miles in green wellies to pay twenty quid for a sprig of herbs at an organic farm. As one of my favourite quotes goes, life’s too damn short to stuff bloody mushrooms (OK, I might have added the sweary bits).
Lots of swearing after Delia in White Girl (BBC2, Monday), part of the Beeb’s tedious White season, a 90 minute drama about a family fleeing to Bradford to escape the mum’s abusive partner. They are the only white family in the area, the three children are the only white pupils at the local school, and, after mum Debbie takes loser husband Steve back, 11 year old daughter Leah soon finds solace in Islam.
Debbie and Steve react with predictable rage; Debbie then goes to the local mosque and by the end of the drama, mother and daughter are reunited after Debbie finds the strength and inner peace to kick Steve out.
"In a way, this is a love story between a mother and a daughter: they’re both trying to reach each other," says actor Anna Maxwell Martin, who played Debbie. This is the main reason I felt uncomfortable about what could have been a good stand-alone drama – everyone comes to art with their own agenda, and watching White Girl, the main thing I saw was a victim of domestic violence finding the strength to be on her own. The film would have been fine, and better, if it had just stuck to this.
The religious element was unnecssary and, especially in the scene where Leah "repels" stepdad Steve by chanting an Islamic prayer at him, patronising. Religion, whether Islam or anything else, was seen as a wonderful answer to this messed up situation and messed up kid, and the scene where Debbie says "I divorce you" to Steve three times, as in Islamic law, was also patronising, in its suggestion that it is only when Debbie started thinking about her life in Islamic terms that she was able to articulate what she needed to say to break free from Steve. A reasonable enough film that, like pretty much everything in the world, would have been much better by leaving the religion out.
Next up was 10 Days to War (BBC2, Tuesday), the start of ten ten-minute shorts portraying the lead up to the invasion of Iraq five years ago. It wasn’t very good, and, as Jeremy Paxman said on Newsnight afterwards, does it matter now? Figures on the death toll in Iraq over the past five years vary from 600,000 to just over a million, so questions on legality five years on are mostly academic.
But still, they need to be asked, and asked again, even if the BBC has chosen a pretty crap way of doing it (and given it the validation of calling it a war instead of what it was, which was an invasion).
The five year anniversary of the invasion is the focus of this Saturday’s demonstration starting at the Arts College, as is the probable upcoming invasion of Iran. It won’t bring back the million in Iraq, but it might stop a million more. Demo starts at 2pm.
Delia, BBC2, Monday
White Girl, BBC2, Monday
10 Days to War, BBC1, Monday
It has been claimed by many in recent years that call centres are the "modern mills". The situation of workers chained to their desks by their headsets, with their loo breaks timed and having to be back at their desks literally on the second after a break, may not sound as bad as sooty-faced Dickensian orphans spluttering their way up chimneys while being pitchforked on the bum by evil Fagan types, but that’s only because you’ve never worked in a call centre.
Phone Rage (Channel 4, Thursday), brought back all those deep-repressed memories of my year in a call centre in 1999, quite literally the worst, most demoralising and most depressing job I have ever had. Doubtless my lily-livered editor will not allow me to mention the phone company I worked for during this year of hell, but suffice to say it was one of the major ones, with one of the first mobile phone networks, and one where you could ring up and find out the numbers of companies anywhere in the UK.
"Anywhere in the UK" was the problem. The contract for this had been "outsourced" to Belfast - in other words, we work cheaper over here so our wages were unlikely to cut too much into the few billion quids’ worth of profit made by Ma Bell. This meant we were not only very busy – 90 calls an hour was the average – but that every fourth or fifth call was an enraged person from Birmingham or Oxford furious that me in Belfast did not know the name of the shop next to Boots on the High Street, and so could not give them the number.
(I was called a "thick Irish bitch" quite a few times, but this just made me chortle and remember the time I asked some chavette in London whether she meant "N for November" and was told, No, n for knife, innit?. Or the time I was asked for a number in Canning Town, and then asked if I was spelling it correctly. Yes, I said, it’s my surname, so I do know how to spell it. Wot? said the amazed Cockney on the other end of the line. Your surname’s Canning Town?)
So, and very probably not what the programme makers intended the reaction to be, my rage was directed at the customers and not the call centre staff. Yes, I know it is infuriating, and I have been enraged on hold myself, but, people, it is not the fault of the poor minimum waged or studenty types on the other end of the phone. Be nice to the mill workers, everyone.
My ire was quenched somewhat by Delia Smith’s new programme on BBC2 on Monday night, quite self-confidently just called "Delia", and giving tips on how to cheat at cooking. Now, as someone whose cooking is what can most kindly be called a bit hit and miss – most of the stuff I make is passable, sometimes it’s stinking and very occasionally I manage a delicious fluke (usually when I add half a bottle of wine to whatever I have in the cauldron) – I was very interested in this, and now Deila, using tinned mince and frozen spuds for her shepherd’s pie, is my new hero.
It’s all the more amusing as it gives me even more ammunition in my "chefs are pretentious gits" rants, as I imagine the likes of Gordon Ramsay going apopoleptically purple and screaming about "f**king frozen potatoes!!" As Delia said, it’s eating. It’s fun, and important, but not that much so.
And how nice to see a cooking programme where the recipes don’t call for you to walk miles in green wellies to pay twenty quid for a sprig of herbs at an organic farm. As one of my favourite quotes goes, life’s too damn short to stuff bloody mushrooms (OK, I might have added the sweary bits).
Lots of swearing after Delia in White Girl (BBC2, Monday), part of the Beeb’s tedious White season, a 90 minute drama about a family fleeing to Bradford to escape the mum’s abusive partner. They are the only white family in the area, the three children are the only white pupils at the local school, and, after mum Debbie takes loser husband Steve back, 11 year old daughter Leah soon finds solace in Islam.
Debbie and Steve react with predictable rage; Debbie then goes to the local mosque and by the end of the drama, mother and daughter are reunited after Debbie finds the strength and inner peace to kick Steve out.
"In a way, this is a love story between a mother and a daughter: they’re both trying to reach each other," says actor Anna Maxwell Martin, who played Debbie. This is the main reason I felt uncomfortable about what could have been a good stand-alone drama – everyone comes to art with their own agenda, and watching White Girl, the main thing I saw was a victim of domestic violence finding the strength to be on her own. The film would have been fine, and better, if it had just stuck to this.
The religious element was unnecssary and, especially in the scene where Leah "repels" stepdad Steve by chanting an Islamic prayer at him, patronising. Religion, whether Islam or anything else, was seen as a wonderful answer to this messed up situation and messed up kid, and the scene where Debbie says "I divorce you" to Steve three times, as in Islamic law, was also patronising, in its suggestion that it is only when Debbie started thinking about her life in Islamic terms that she was able to articulate what she needed to say to break free from Steve. A reasonable enough film that, like pretty much everything in the world, would have been much better by leaving the religion out.
Next up was 10 Days to War (BBC2, Tuesday), the start of ten ten-minute shorts portraying the lead up to the invasion of Iraq five years ago. It wasn’t very good, and, as Jeremy Paxman said on Newsnight afterwards, does it matter now? Figures on the death toll in Iraq over the past five years vary from 600,000 to just over a million, so questions on legality five years on are mostly academic.
But still, they need to be asked, and asked again, even if the BBC has chosen a pretty crap way of doing it (and given it the validation of calling it a war instead of what it was, which was an invasion).
The five year anniversary of the invasion is the focus of this Saturday’s demonstration starting at the Arts College, as is the probable upcoming invasion of Iran. It won’t bring back the million in Iraq, but it might stop a million more. Demo starts at 2pm.
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