It’s a familiar scene: a taxi driver is moaning about the immigrants. They’ve made it like a colony, he says. They come over here, become residents in order to take advantage of free medical care, it should be paid for by the people using it, it’s ruining the economy. Another man calls them barbarians. They don’t adopt the local customs, they piss in the streets, behind cars, they smell, they’re mad, fat, slags …
Ukip manifesto perhaps? No, because this is actually southern Spain. There are Brits involved – they’re the immigrants, though, and this is Costa del Sol: Last Brits Standing (BBC1).
“They look at us like we’re their Polish, over here, nicking their jobs” says Big Dave, who runs Hardy’s Bar in Calahonda. Up the coast in Benalmádena, Bronte and Sasha share a one-bedroom apartment with five other British girls. “We live here like the people in the UK think the Romanians and Polish live,” one says. They are heading home, the bars they work in are closing, for the season, for ever.
Loads of Brits are heading home for ever. Not 82-year-old Elsie, though. Elsie who retired here, would love to go home. Well, Elsie doesn’t always know what she wants, she suffers from dementia, but her family wants her back in Britain. They can’t sell the house, though, so Elsie and her husband are stuck out there. Big Dave’s stuck for a different reason. He can’t leave, he’s on €60,000 bail. Dave’s old-school Costa del Crime, Sexy Beast.
Colin, whose state pension just covers the rent in the deserted complex he lives in, is an eternal optimist. He’s getting going, yet again, with his jive dancing classes for fellow expats, and a brand new advert on the radio. There will be dancing again in Spain.
But the overall picture is a bleak one. Ghostlike concrete structures litter the hillsides, buildings started in the boom times, now abandoned and forgotten, like the ageing expat population, who came in happier times for the sun and sea etc. Now they’re losing their homes, and their marbles, and all respect from the locals whose language they never bothered to learn. Matt Rudge, whose film this is, even manages to find grey skies and rain. All those Ss, turned to shit.
On a cheerier note: Teens (Channel 4). I know I wrote about it last week, but Teens is about the best – certainly the most interesting and innovative with all the digital stuff going on – programme on television right now. It deserves another mention. And this is another cracker of an episode, about young love and sex … Well, of course it is, what else could it be about, they’re teens.
So Harry, who’s lovely and has a nice relationship with his mum, gets together with lovely Rebecca. But it seems that Harry’s really all about the words, doesn’t have the emotional maturity to back them up. So when Rebecca tells him she loves him, he runs. Well, of course he does, he’s a kid, and a boy. And of course Rebecca doesn’t really love him, she only does at that moment on the phone when it came blurting out. Oops.
Meanwhile, Shauna – also lovely – doesn’t just have her own demons and issues of self-esteem to battle with, she has her Christian faith. But with help from her friends – who knows, maybe from God, too – and an awful lot of guts on her own part, things are beginning to look possible, promising even, with James.
It’s really touching, moving even, as well as funny and embarrassing and all the other things you associate with the age. What’s most striking about Teens though is how incredibly open and honest and even mature they are – about what they’re going through. Even Jokey Harry (a new hero of mine, after Jess last week). And good at talking about it all. In fact, it’s the parents – Shauna’s (who don’t appear to be as excited about their daughter’s faith as she is) and Harry’s mum (less excited about her son losing his virginity, and talking about it, than he is) – who are embarrassed and awkward and not at all good at the communication side of things.
Interesting soundtrack by the way – aimed very much at the parents’ generation. Perhaps this is really aimed at them. US, I mean, aimed at us. It really is time I came to terms with the fact I’m no longer a teen myself.
