There must be, somewhere deep in the bowels of one of our palaces of learning, a place where producers and their interns go to learn the art of retro-engineering: how to yoke two disparate ideas together via a concept superficially cogent or convincing enough to pass commissioning muster. On the walls are expensively framed portrait photographs of previous star graduates. “Celebrities plus skin-crawling tasks involving animals’ anatomies,” reads the citation beneath one such luminary. “Answer: survival show – I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here.” “Fibrillating erotic fantasy plus childcare – Tom Hardy reads CBeebies Bedtime Stories.” And so on. I imagine.
The latest forcible pairing probably won’t make it on to the wall of fame but it’s a commendable effort nevertheless, bringing millennials into contact with older generations and reaping the bountiful fruits that occur when you bring one set of expectations and prejudices into contact with another. It is Channel 4’s Lodgers for Codgers, and it is absolutely as basic as it sounds.
There are 3.8 million old age pensioners, we are told at the top of the programme, living alone in the UK and 3.4 million young adults unable to move out of their parental homes. What to do? What to do? Why not solve this inequitable conundrum by sending a handful of clear-skinned, pink-livered, lively-eyed young things currently condemned to life in their childhood bedrooms on a “speed-dating” event with a more battered, gimlet-eyed handful of boomers-and-beyond who have rooms to spare in the houses they bought for seven and six back in the days of three-channel TV and dinosaurs (which, if some of the characters on display here are to be taken as representative, are thought by the Instagram generation to be roughly contemporaneous). The former will seek to become the lodgers – d’you see? – of the latter, who are codgers.
I hope that’s clear.
Nicole, 26, shares a four-bed semi-detached house with five other family members, spends £600 a month on clothes and beauty treatments and has built up a successful fashion business via social media. She is paired with frugal Claudia (64) and Ted (59) who have a six-bedroom house in Hastings and, as their pensions, six rental properties in London and the south-east. Nicole is gobsmacked by the idea of cooking from scratch, recycling (“You just use the bag till the handle breaks or something?”) and leaving the house on time. Ted hovers somewhere between bemused and entertained. Claudine does not.
Liam, a sweet 19-year-old baby whose mother does all his cooking, washing and cleaning, goes to live with magnificently mardy 83-year-old Flo in the house where she raised a family alone after a childhood in an orphanage (“chucked out at 15 – set of clothes, a railway ticket, ‘Piss off’”) and feels very little need to do much in the way of cooking, washing or cleaning for herself, let alone a lodger. It’s quite exhilarating, though she softens – just a little – under Liam’s inexhaustible kindness.
There’s no insight, analysis or rigour here. The lodgers and codgers are only together for a week (both sets rub along well enough in the end but both Liam and Nicole decide not to impose on their hosts any longer), which isn’t long enough for even the most specious emotional journey to take place (“I must help my mum when I go home!” as Liam exclaims halfway through cleaning his first bath, is about as far as it goes). It’s an hour that won’t do you any harm or any good. Which is about all I ask, at my age anyway.
