On British television’s Chan­nel 4, there is a new real­ity series, titled, “How The Other Half Live.” The pre­miss of the show is a rich British fam­ily helps out a poor British fam­ily. This is an opin­ion piece about the show by Tim Nichols, in the Guardian.

Belinda Webb may call it “poverty voyeurism”, but frankly we should be look­ing directly into the lives of Britain’s low-income fam­i­lies. It’s a shame she judged How the Other Half Live before she watched it. Despite my reser­va­tions about its premise of a wealthy fam­ily spon­sor­ing a poor fam­ily, I found the first episode mov­ing, sen­si­tive and informative.

In giv­ing one of Britain’s most dis­ad­van­taged fam­i­lies a rare prime­time voice, it made vis­i­ble many of the fac­tors lim­it­ing the lives of the UK’s 4 mil­lion chil­dren below the poverty line and that act as bar­ri­ers to fam­i­lies mov­ing out of poverty.

Yes, real­ity shows can exploit their sub­jects, but they don’t always. When did you last see an hour-long prime-time pro­gramme dri­ven by the voice of an intel­li­gent and artic­u­late 10-year-old girl stuck in a small, barely-furnished flat in a grotty Lon­don tower block?

The Joseph Rown­tree Foun­da­tion has spent over two years on a major stream of work research­ing pub­lic atti­tudes to UK poverty and media por­tray­als of those who lose out in Britain’s cul­ture of inequal­ity. The research finds peo­ple are scep­ti­cal about UK poverty because it has so lit­tle vis­i­bil­ity in main­stream cul­ture. This leaves pub­lic per­cep­tions to be dis­torted by mis­lead­ing and stig­ma­tis­ing por­tray­als, rang­ing from tabloid hack jobs on fam­i­lies receiv­ing ben­e­fits to the vul­gar chav stereo­types in Lit­tle Britain and The Kather­ine Tate Show.

While Matt Lucas has never called up the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) to dis­cuss the verac­ity and impact of his por­tray­als of low-income fam­i­lies, the pro­duc­ers of How the Other Half Live did. In fact they spoke to dozens of organ­i­sa­tions work­ing on behalf of low-income fam­i­lies and work­ing in deprived com­mu­ni­ties. This kind of dia­logue has also been facil­i­tated by the Joseph Rown­tree Foundation’s project, which has sought to bring together jour­nal­ists and pro­gramme mak­ers with organ­i­sa­tions tack­ling poverty. As well as work­ing to pre­vent media con­tent that stig­ma­tises those on low incomes and mis­leads audi­ences, we have chal­lenged pro­gramme mak­ers to inno­vate for­mats that make poverty vis­i­ble and under­stand­able to main­stream audi­ences, show­ing pos­i­tive por­tray­als of peo­ple strug­gling hard in dif­fi­cult cir­cum­stances and giv­ing low-income fam­i­lies a voice.

As the series con­tin­ues I hope we can move on to debat­ing the poverty and inequal­ity it brings into view. Issues like why fam­i­lies are strug­gling on such inad­e­quate incomes, in such poor qual­ity hous­ing with­out the money to fur­nish them, crip­pled by debt and with­out access to the skills sup­port and child­care that will help them into decent work. Bar­ri­ers like the tremen­dous social exclu­sion the three young girls in the Gumpo fam­ily face, that could so eas­ily see them failed by the edu­ca­tion, sys­tem despite their obvi­ous intel­li­gence and potential.

I hope that, hav­ing now seen the pro­gramme, Belinda Webb is happy that the Gumpo family’s voices were heard by a main­stream audi­ence. Maybe her next com­ment will be about how we should all respond as a nation to end Britain’s cul­ture of inequal­ity and ensure that the duty to end UK child poverty by 2020, in a bill cur­rently before par­lia­ment, is met.

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