So what can five celebs with 10 houses and a palace between them tell us about homelessness?
Last night’s Famous, Rich and Homeless on BBC1 (watch again here) set out to find out. Journalist Rosie Boycott, comedian Hardeep Singh, former tennis player Annabel Croft, actor Bruce Jones and James, Marquess of Blandord were sent to sleep rough by Big Issue founder John Bird and former Centrepoint worker Craig Last.
I should confess at this point that I’m not exactly the greatest fan of reality TV - and the reviews have not been universally kind - but I kept watching as they coped with being dumped on the streets with just the clothes they stood up in.
Rosie’s lies about being homeless because she’d been beaten up by her drunken husband nets her £8 straight off and then another £40 from one woman.
Annabel is dropped in Soho but is soon sleeping rough in the doorway of Dolce and Gabana in Bond Street and finding out where to get fed. Hardeep (‘I don’t want to be urinated on unless it’s in the privacy of my own home’) heads straight for Soho.
Bruce offers to take pictures of tourists at Westminster and then asks them for money. ‘I’m working - it’s not begging,’ he says.
And James? As readers of the tabloids will have already known, on the first night he disappears into the car park of a 5 star hotel where his camera crew is conveniently escorted off the premises and Craig later discovers his untouched sleeping bag. On the second the production team let him sleep in the hotel. On the third, he’s walking out of the programme pursued up the street by John Bird.
All entertaining stuff. I’m not sure it’s going to change many viewers’ opinions about homelessness but it should open a few eyes about life on the streets and (tonight) in hostels. As for the ten houses and a palace (though I’m not sure James actually gets to inherit the palace), at no stage were they seen as potentially part of the problem.
I did find myself wonder though what the John Bird who was telling the Daily Mail two years ago that the answer was to ‘lock up the homeless’ might make of all this.
‘What nobody wants to acknowledge is that 90 per cent of people in and around homelessness have drink and drug problems. And 90 per cent of that figure are people who cannot control it,’ he wrote. ‘The people who are homeless through addiction are feckless, unstable, unreliable, incapable of holding down a job, feeding themselves or cleaning themselves.
‘You take them into a hostel, patch them up and put them in State housing on benefits and they continue to kill themselves at the State’s expense. They are ill and should be “sectioned” - lifted from the streets and confined in the care of the mental health system, behind bars if necessary. It sounds drastic - and I expect a lot of outraged criticism - but it is the only realistic solution.’
Whether you agree or disagree with that draconian solution, what about James, Marquess of Blandford, reality show cheat ….and drug abuser?
Famous, Rich and Sectioned? I was about to say I’d watch that…but then I realised a TV producer is probably pitching the idea somewhere even as I speak.
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