Okey-dokey, pig in a pokey! (Benefit Busters)

Member Name: thedevilinme

Product:	Benefit Busters
Date:	25/08/09 (169 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great telly

Disadvantages: Exploitation of vulnerable people

Mickey:Ive got an interview to drive fire engines Pauline.
Pauline: Mickey! If you walk out the door, I'll have no option but to stop your benefit.
Ross: She can't do that!
Pauline: Try me.
Mickey: Please Pauline, I feel confident.
Pauline: Well you look ridiculous! I know they put monkeys in space, but do you think they'll have one driving a fire engine.
[Mickey sits down dejected]
Pauline: That's right Mickey love; you stick to what you know, eh? Jobseekers!
(The League of Gentleman, BBC 2, 2001)

With poor old Fergie taking the flak once again for patronising the great unwashed with one of her sink estate TV experiments (the fee helping her pay for her second butler in her Manhattan office!) it is the season to be merry for those who have actually still got a job to have a go at those who haven't, especially those who have never worked, documentaries like the above and 'Benefit Busters' always making for great TV. We just love to see people worse off than ourselves on the goggle box.

The tag-line for Channel 4s 'Benefit Busters' is that all the income tax we pay now goes straight to people on the social, six million on some sort of benefit these days ( and voting for Labour no doubt). And with double the number of 'NEETs' (young people not in employment, education or training) doubling under New Labour there will be a lot more of these TV programs to come. There are currently 350,000 drug addicts alone on benefits under New Labor.

The series follows the training courses of 'A4E', a huge recruitment and training company that has been awarded £100 million worth of government contracts to help retrain the long term unemployed in job seeking skills and confidence building, 'a revolution' according to Gordon Brown. But anyone who has been unemployed know full well these schemes have been around for donkeys years and a complete waste of time, thirty people jammed into one room, full of losers, designed purely to get you to sign off in the summer as the body odour intensifies and tempers fray.

In the documentary format we follow Hayley Taylor (in set), the leader of the A4E course in Doncaster, the fat capital of Britain no less, Hayley full of beans (literally) and wanting to help her class of single moms get back to work, a bonus for her company for each one that does get a job during the course. Single moms now have to start looking for employment once their children hit seven years of age (previously it was 16) or lose some benefits, the idea of the courses being it might discourage some women not to have kids in the future knowing they wont get handouts. It's a good plan in theory as there are currently 700,000 single mums here, comfortably the highest total on benefits in Europe. The problem is they will have another one when the kid is 6 and a half to start again on benefits, defeating the object somewhat. The stigma on show here is because the moms seem to settle into the lifestyle of failure, the poverty cycle eventually repeats with their kids, as it did with some of these girls and their moms..

Hayley is Pauline from the League of Gentleman in all but name (which Little Britain copied with the Fatbusters version, of course), in this obsessed TV generation why Hayley was picked for this 'dolumentry' in the first place we presume. Hayley is a worthy but a somewhat condensing caring mix of the two. But her infatuation is not for pens but fast food, she a portly Northern lass, as indeed are her class of depressed and lazy moms, Fatbusters meets Restart, Jamie Oliver and not jobseeker skills what's required.

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Pauline: "Everything I know about people I learned from pens. If they don't work, you shake them. And if they still don't work, you chuck them away. Bin 'em!"
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One of the mums is pasty Dawn, 75k in debt, but still having enough left over from her £417 a month dole money to have full Virgin cable (with the best TV package!). She tells the camera she 'just wants the best for her kids'...cartoons and that'. Yes but we are paying luv! Being on the 'rock n roll' clearly enables her legal slack from her debts and so control over those repayments. She is the living embodiment of the sub prime debt.

Each week the course has a particular theme, week one 'Caterpillar to Butterfly', week two,' Confidence', and so on and so on... mums that clearly can't afford to work or have lost their confidence now that the man of the house has scarpered, leaving them caught in the poverty bear trap, not willing to struggle free by trying to jemmy open the trap. If they do those minimum wage jobs that are only available to them the child care will soon eat it up the pay packet, the girls pointlessly dragged onto these courses purely to try and win middle-class votes for the government of the day.

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Pauline: "Some of us, like Ross here, will want to follow in their father's footsteps... but you can't sign on forever".
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After getting used to the camera the girls are soon dressed in black to look thinner on that camera, including Pauline... errr Hayley, her increasingly patronising manner well meaning but soon somewhat overbearing, beating the mums around emotionally like a piñata (a donkey thing full of sweets...and she wants the sweets) to break them down to build them up again, confronting the women's drink and debt problems, telling others they are useless because they don't want to work in McDonalds. It's McDonald's and the like, of course, that made them overweight in the first place so they would lose their confidence in the work place. Hayley doesn't think like that. A jobs a job and the more she can shovel into menial work the higher her bonus. We haven't invited a million Poles here for a laugh luv!

Dawn is not so keen to take any job but would like to be a DJ , so willing to take an interview in town for the said position, but likely to collapse the DJ booth if she got the job, which she didn't, claiming she didn't like DJ hours as they didn't fit in with her kids?? I don't think Dawn went to the interview.

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Ross: How's he going to get a job if you don't let him go for his interview?
Pauline: How's he going to get an interview if he doesn't know his job options?
Ross: But he's already got an interview.
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The girls are then 'told' to attend a mass interview at Doncaster's 'Poundland', Pauline tucking into another plate of burger and chips on camera in celebration for this supreme feat of retail headhunting, gushing and proud she got the girls this far as she gulps down another class of Pinot Grigot. Unfortunately the girls can't dodge the arranged interview as it's a breech of the jobseekers agreement. These are the only people who work in Poundland. You get the feeling this course was only ever about working in Poundland, workers without jobs for jobs without workers. Rather pleasingly all the girls are given a two week trial there, an update on the final credit roll telling us they still work there and enjoying it, except one, she not taking the job as her benefit payments for her four kids are worth far more, ultimately the biggest problem with the British benefit system, having kid after kid pushing up your money and hooking you into the system the way it works. If you don't have qualifications and happy around kids all day then you can understand why they do it. I'm sure a lot of moms reading this who work hard (even the posh ones) are having some sympathy for them, the supermom women at work and home conundrum all a big con just to shift more capitalist cr*p.

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Pauline: Ooh, its half past nine. Time for men, men with jobs, to go to work. Other men stay in bed until dinnertime watching Tots TV, thinking about how worthless and pathetic they are... Good morning, jobseekers
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-The Conclusion-

Society can not provide decent jobs for everyone, so, as I said before, 'its workers without jobs for jobs without workers' time here. A4E earn from these courses by keeping the clients there, of course, paid £100 per week per person, something not mentioned in the program, as is the fact some of these schemes are under investigation for running cons, signing in people who don't exist so to receive a phantom fee. A4E, rather wonderfully, are at the centre of this fraud.

http://hubpages.com/hub/a4e-fraud

The company's single mom owner is based in Hull, living in a lavish vulgar pile, Hull the single parent capital of the world, rather appropriately. It's ironic really as the government abandoned courses like this in 2001 because of mass fraud with those previous schemes. A4E were awarded £7m pound contract during the fraud investigation, so far having to pay back 48 grand and rising. The claim made in the show that A4E has returned 19,772 single moms back into work must be taking with a pinch of salt, which Hayley no doubt sprinkled on her chips right away. Hayley is a good girl but your clients need to be respected and they are not factory hens.

Although there is a feel good factor to be taking watching this program it is essentially targeted at a Middle-Class audience to make them feel better and give them the opportunity to sneer at the great unwashed, maybe buy some of the expensive products advertised in the commercial breaks to reaffirm that social class gap. Recession is great time to exploit the unemployed on TV and it's sure to get a big commercial audience, Boys from the Blackstuff and Shamless born out of previous recessions. Lets face it guys it's a subject on everyone's minds.
That aside its entertaining and in keeping with the X-Factor ethos where everyone wants to be on TV, even jobseekers, no shame over being an unemployed single mom on national telly it seems. A4E`s involvement, of course, is clearly to try and prove they too are not exploiting the situation...after those fraud allegations...


Pauline: Ross, that is not my responsibility. My responsibility is turning you all into job seekers. Now, where would I be if you all got work before the end of the course?
Colin: On the dole.
Pauline: Exactly! I'd be here sitting next to you stinking of sh*t! This is my job we're talking about!

Summary: Car crash TV