Back for a fourth season despite looking a little wrung out, Rich House, Poor House (Channel 5) is distinctive among a crop of cultural exchange reality shows in that a) for better or worse, it’s still with us, and b) it seeks to limit the variables of difference to one: money.
The two life-swapping families featured may come from “opposite ends of the wealth divide” – ie the richest and poorest 10% – but they are pretty alike in most other respects. Their interests and aspirations seem to overlap. Each family has two kids – a boy and a girl, of similar ages. One mum is training to be a yoga instructor, the other is a newly qualified swimming instructor. It’s true that only one household has a dad, but he works so much that he is hardly ever home. The two families live 34 miles apart.
The one stark contrast is disposable income. After mortgage payments and bills, Terry Morgan and her kids Coral and Theo live off £158 a week. For the Colemans (Peter, Jo, Lucy and Matt) it’s more like £1,800 a week. The Colemans – very much the Haves in this experiment – live in a £750,000 house in Salisbury, which they swapped for a week in Terry’s £150,000 flat above an Indian restaurant in the aptly named Hampshire town of Havant. Jo’s yoga training is part of a downsizing plan to give her a better quality of life. Terry struggles to pay for the further training she needs to make ends meet.
Often with this type of programme one’s prurience is rewarded with a satisfying infusion of self-righteousness: you might comfortably expect one of the participants to hold objectionable views, or to possess a misplaced sense of entitlement. If you are lucky, someone could be in for a rude awakening, as in that show where buy-to-let landlords have to live in their own crappy properties. But you didn’t get much of that in episode one of this new series of Rich House, Poor House. Everyone was good-natured, understanding and politically circumspect.
“I think everyone deserves a chance to thrive,” said Rich House dad Peter, “and I truly don’t know how people could at the other end of the income scale.” But the Colemans didn’t struggle to live like the Morgans for a week, apart from Peter having to give up coffee when the food budget got tight. In fact, slumming it seemed to agree with them – they bonded over budget meals and board games in Terry’s old camper van. The Morgans also had a jolly time trying to use up £1,791.90 in seven days the way the Colemans might; they ate fillet steak and had music lessons and went paddle-boarding instead of, say, buying a car.
Indeed, you would have to call the experiment an unqualified success on all fronts: eye-opening, in a good way, for everybody involved. The girls mixed effortlessly with the friends of their counterparts. Peter realised he needed to spend more time at home. Team spirit abounded. Nobody was overwhelmed by hardship, or unsettled by a glimpse of how the other half lives, which is, frankly, not how this sort of thing is supposed to work.
The stated quest of this series is “to discover whether money really does buy happiness”, a question to which the answer is usually “no” when you have got lots of money, and “yes” when you haven’t. But both these families already seemed happy – the children were all bright, funny and well-behaved, and the parents hard-working and upbeat. After they swapped back, the Colemans offered to pay for Terry’s further training, which was nice. Far from revealing vast discrepancies between rich and poor – and the injustice that might engender – the programme ended on the idea that the differences were minimal, with benefits on both sides.
Rich House, Poor House is not a political programme. It dwells on personal journeys and small life lessons – the Coleman siblings learn to cook the family supper, the way the Morgan kids do, and enjoy it. Because it is not political, it probably does not mean to expressly promote the idea that growing income disparity is no big deal, that “happiness is more about the people you have around you” and that wealth needs to be de-stigmatised as much as poverty, because money doesn’t matter. But really, in the absence of any other message, that’s sort of all you are left with. And it’s not much.
