This look at life on two inner-city estates is a gentle, sincere take that sees survivalist Ed Stafford spend three weeks living there. It’s a far cry from the patronising work of Michael Portillo et al
I hadn’t realised how traumatised I remain by Michael Portillo. Not so much the trousers and jackets sported on his train travel, although they remain borderline criminal, but his efforts to engage with The Poor. First in 1993, when he emulated the lifestyle of a single mother on benefits (“For someone like me, who’s never had to think about these things, it’s just boring having to think all the time about how you buy the cheapest things and whether the money’s going to last”). And then again – because those poor and their boring lives are always with us, are they not? – five years ago he gave us a feature-length documentary in which he oozed around the council estates of England in Our Housing Crisis: Who’s to Blame? If memory serves, the answer somehow wasn’t Margaret Thatcher’s reign-defining sell-off of the public housing stock (we had 6.5m council homes in 1980; nearly a third of them were transferred to private hands under the Right to Buy scheme). Instead, it was apparently the failure of councils to build replacements since. Obvious, really, especially if you are a devotee of oleaginous logic delivered with a smug but straight face.
But it all comes flooding back. As do awful memories of Matthew Parris attempting to live on benefits for a week in 1983. He considered the people he met, living “meagre and threadbare” lives, were at the right level of poverty to stay motivated, and returned 20 years later to find how things had turned out. Fortunately, in 60 Days on the Estates, Ed Stafford – who spends three weeks on a London estate then three weeks on its Brummie equivalent in next week’s episode – might be another middle-aged, middle-class white man, but he is not a Tory MP. This, it turns out, makes quite the difference.
