Putting Tories On The Dole: Slumming It

Fagburn doesn't usually approve of e-petitions, mainly as they often serve little purpose beyond making someone feel good about themselves for ten seconds.
But I did sign the one asking Ian Duncan Smith to prove his claim he can live on £53 a week for a year.
Mainly as it's clearly making the hopelessly out-of-touch millionaire upper class-warrior squirm.
But lest we forget, back in 1984 another then Tory MP took up this challenge - our old chum comedy posh gay, Matthew Parris.
In a wonderful display of not-really-getting-the-point-ness, Parris lived for exactly one week (!) on £26.80 - which wasn't a lot of money in those days.
Undaunted by the laughter and contempt this patronising exercise incurred, he repeated it in 2004.
Sadly neither programme is on YouTube*, but here's a cracking demolition job of the last one by Gareth McLean in The Guardian, drawing comparisons with the equally patronising 2003 doc, When Michael Portillo Became A Single Mum.

Politicians may volunteer for such swaps imagining their credibility rising, but they rarely contemplate how idiotic they may appear. (This at least gives them something in common with other stars of reality TV.)
All of which is perhaps well and good. The use of personalities, such as Parris and Portillo, may draw to a film about poverty viewers who wouldn't otherwise watch. After all, poverty is ugly and nasty: not what anyone would call preferred viewing. But there is also a danger - in the sparks of worlds colliding, in the bright lights of personality-led current affairs - that the bigger issue gets lost. Everything is reduced to spectacle (see refined Parris in a nasty fitted kitchen!) and the wider context ignored.
In contrast to an authored report on poverty, say, there is scant analysis, but a claim to greater authenticity. It is, of course, a spurious claim: reality TV is a misnomer, an oxymoron. Matthew Parris negotiating life on a £55 budget becomes a variation on the tasks undertaken in the Big Brother house, slumming it in Newcastle akin to surviving in the I'm A Celebrity jungle. It's poverty as entertainment and very little else.

* The latter one, For The Benefit Of Mr Parris Revisited, appears to be on some of those sites where you have to sign away your life first and may just be phishing, so these are AYOR.

PS More recently we had "disgraced" Lib Dem Mark Oaten - gasp! - living on a Tower Hamlets council estate for a bit in Tower Block Of Commons - truly a documentary too disgusting to be described on a family blog.

Update: Matthew Parris writes in The Times his programme was a pointless exercise ("and this is the killer-objection to trying a life on benefits for a week — one week ain’t the half of it..."), and - oops! - faked; he and the camera crew actually left before the week was out.