The Strange World of Kirsty Young

The other night I watched Kirsty Young’s ‘The British at Work’ (10^th March, BBC2) with the usual mixture of anticipation and dread that any new documentary series on the BBC can generate. For all the entertaining enlightenment I might get out of a BBC doc’, there is always the danger of Alice Roberts spending at least  half a program making sure I know what it’s about (just in case I’m a bit thick or too distracted by the ‘Hello’ article I’m trying to read at the same time).  The first part of Kirsty’s series was okay, I suppose, but I couldn’t help feeling irritated beyond belief by Kirsty’s somewhat sheltered view of the typical British working experience.  This first part was entitled ‘We Can Make It’ and dealt with the travails of the working Brit in the post-war period 1945-1964. As interesting as this might have been, she set the scene by poking one of my bugbears in the eye with a big stick.

‘Nowadays, most of us’, we were informed, ‘do a job we like’.

Oh, do we?

‘In fact, most of us would say our job defines us’.

At this point, I have become so cross that I had to rewind five minutes later as I realised I’d stopped listening and was simply venting cartoon steam from ears. Kirsty’s point was that in the twenty-first century we are all lucky enough to choose what we do, while our parents and grandparents simply did whatever they could to keep a roof over their heads. Kirsty felt the need to point out that even her grandparents (we got rather a lot of Kirsty’s grandparents over the course of the program) had awful jobs. Her grandfather worked in a shipyard (presumably while wearing a flat cap and clutching a pint of ‘Heavy’) while her grandmother put the walnuts on our whips (the cheeky little minx).

Of course, nowadays we all have fulfilling jobs in the media.

Except we don’t. Speaking as someone with twenty-two and a half soul destroying years in the civil service behind them, I can absolutely guarantee that many of us do not like our jobs and would be horrified that anyone thought these jobs defined us.  But enough about me. Does Kirsty not even manage to get down her local Waitrose? (I’m taking a shot that Kirsty may not be an Asda girl). I’m pretty certain that even in the mighty ‘Trose, the average shelf-stacker does not consider that their stacking duties ‘define’ them in any way. Kirsty fails to realise that many people are trapped in jobs by their financial commitments. This wasn’t just an immediate post-war phenomena; it’s as true now as it ever was, perhaps more so. Many of us have never found out what we’re good at. As clichéd as it might sound, some people may just never have got the ‘breaks’. Who, exactly, does Kirsty think clean the toilets?

If it sounds like I’m a bit too worked up about this, just remember that Kirsty might just be representative of the media types who make these programs. I hope not, but you can see all too easily that this might be the case. An awful image forms of Kirsty and her media chums sitting in a trendy London bar talking about their next project for a public they know nothing about; a public that seems to be invisible to them in a world where bins empty themselves and the wheels just turn by the collective wishful thinking of their social set.

Or am I being a bit dumb here? Was Kirsty talking to me, personally? Well, not just me. That would be odd to say the least; but me as a representative of that oh-so-important group of people: The documentary viewers. Perhaps Kirsty assumes we’re not like everyone else. The shelf stackers are all watching the X Factor and the civil servants are all retreating to some alcoholic refuge to hide from their own souls. I find this view even more disturbing. Kirsty has decided that her program is not for everyone; just nice people with the wherewithal to achieve their career goals and get nice job in the media. You can watch if you’re not one of us but don’t expect to enjoy it; we didn’t really make if for you.

Oh well, on that dark note, I look forward to the rest of the series if only to discover at what point Kirsty thinks we all got nice jobs and found self-fulfilment. I wonder what that episode will be called.