There’s a lot of rubbish on the telly. Literally. 24 Hours In The Past (BBC1) is a recycled idea: send people back in time, to live as we lived before. It’s slebs this time though, to live like plebs, Victorian dustyard workers.
Can they really get an understanding of life in the 1840s in just a day? Probably not. There have been more valid live-like-then television experiments – The 1900 House and its spin-offs, more recently Back In Time for Dinner with the lovely Robshaw family (both nicer and more entertaining than most so-called stars, bring on the age of non-celebrity). But there is something satisfying about seeing (vaguely) familiar faces off the telly wading around in excrement, literally, like sewer rats.
First they’re stripped of their clothes and given Victorian ones. “You look a bit like a murderer,” Miquita Oliver (TV and radio personality) tells Colin Jackson (hurdler turned TV personality). Ann Widdecombe (politician turned media personality) looks a bit like Ann Widdecombe – exactly the same as before, in fact, confirming what most of us suspected: that Ann has always been and will always be a Victorian.
Alistair McGowan can’t let the day job (impressionist) go; one minute he’s Raymond Blanc, then Brendan Foster, as he polishes a bone or loads a canal boat. Imagine what he’d be like to live with (confusing, and a bit annoying, I’d have thought).
The jobs – dustmen, street cleaners, carpetbeaters – are handed out by Ruth Goodman, the historian and TV personality (you know, she’s always around when there’s dressing up and living in the past going on; again you suspect she would have been happier being born earlier in history). Plus there’s a real live scrapyard owner, Mr Hill, to play the Dickensian boss. Presenting is Fi Glover – also with a bit of the 19th century about her, schoolmistressy though, perhaps a governess, certainly posher than our riff-raff celebrities.
The sleb-plebs are soon put to work – flagellating a filthy old rug, emptying bins of ash and household waste, sifting through soot, washing rags, cleaning bones, sweeping the streets. More like scooping than sweeping: the streets are deep in horse manure, all real, Fi confirms. What about the “pure”, is that real, too? Pure is dog faeces, used for softening leather at the tannery, and it’s a valuable find. “I thought he meant kind of fake-tanning, like making people brown,” says Hollyoaks actor Zoe “out of” Lucker. Yeah, rub that in your face, then give us a kiss.
At night Colin, Alistair and Tyger Drew-Honey from Outnumbered have to go round the privvies with their cart, collecting “night soil”. Back in the day London generated enough night soil to fill the Albert Hall four and a half times every year, says Fi. Night soil = human poo. Is that real’n’all? I’m actually beginning to feel sorry for them.
I’m also disappointed in them. For just accepting that women get paid half as much as the men for doing the same job. Don’t just take it, go on strike, have a march, be more impressive, more modern. Oh, and for paying the “knocker-upper” a day’s wages just for banging on the door in the morning. A knocker-upper was just a human alarm clock, he didn’t actually impregnate anyone. An outrageous scam.
Next week, Tyger’s crime (he stole a carrot from a shop) is going to be discovered and he’s going to get hanged. Maybe.
Next, Wastemen (BBC2), tailing Geordie binmen on their rounds, then back to the waste processing plant in Byker, which is where Ant’n’Dec would have ended up working if it hadn’t been for their TV break. Actually very few people work there, it’s mostly done by machines. Site manager Bob Pollock watches the conveyor belt (until it breaks down), playing The Generation Game alone with his city’s waste. Otherwise, most of the life there has four legs, long tails, whiskers and relatively large front teeth. Here’s one, tucking into the scraps off Newcastle’s collective Christmas dinner plate. Mmmm, sprouts.
It’s a different story at O’Brien’s recycling plant, where a hi-vis human team grab their designated material – paper, plastic, glass etc – from their own belt. Seriously fast belt, and not a whole lot better than being a Victorian dustyard worker by the look of it. I’ve often wondered how it all got separated. Now I know, and from now on I’m going to be (even) better and more meticulous about what goes in what colour bin.
As a nation we generate enough rubbish hourly to fill the Albert Hall, says Shaun Dooley, narrating. Oi, what is it about the Albert Hall? It’s supposed to be filled with beautiful music. Stop filling it with rubbish and human waste.
