Tory Rascal

Mark Oaten is, err, in da hood. (Image: C4)

Channel 4’s Tower Block of Commons makes for impressive, albeit painfully exploitative, viewing. You should, by now, know the premise – a bunch of archetypical, seemingly expense-addled MPs volunteer (with one notable exception) to spend a week living with people who endure grinding poverty. Channel 4 calls this a ’social experiment’. I’m not sure that’s strictly accurate, but it’s certainly good TV.

I grew up in similarly dirty and miserable conditions to those of some of the residents of the various estates. Thankfully, though, one excellent comprehensive school and a career in the Armed Forces turned out to be good escape routes; with those, my family’s descent into chaos was infinitely more bearable than it would have been had I lived on a run-down, drug-infested and largely forgotten council estate – and definitely more bearable than it would have been had the heroically offensive Austin Mitchell dropped by with his fragrant wife Linda, a bunch of friends and a hefty serving of Grimsby fish pie.

Mitchell, I’m afraid, isn’t faring too well. Whereas the other MPs – Nadine Dorries (who recounted her South Acton experiences on this very blog last year), former LibDem leadership hopeful Mark Oaten and shadow children’s minister Tim Loughton – are all living with poor families, Mitchell has refused to live with the residents, and manages to blunder from crass remark to crass remark in an incredible display of buffoonery and oafishness.

Harriet Harman was not best impressed by Mr Mitchell's "joke".

I don’t doubt for one moment that Mitchell is truly moved by the people he meets, but when he refuses even to try to live on Jobseeker’s Allowance for a week (“that’s silly,” he sagely observes), preferring to vanish for a delightful, pesto-soaked dinner party with his mates, you do have to remind yourself that this is a Labour MP. (That said, when he describes grocery shopping as ‘women’s work’ you could think his days under the Labour whip are numbered. It’s too easy to imagine Harriet Harman turning purple with rage at his outrageous chauvinism – perhaps with a single, engorged vein pulsating on her forehead with sheer feminist indignation.)

The other three MPs all fare better. Nadine – replacing Iain Duncan Smith (who left after his wife, Betsy, was diagnosed with cancer during filming) – seems to be getting on well with her host family, despite unintentionally offending them by producing £50 from her bra to buy gifts for the children (as she explains on her own blog). Mark Oaten and Tim Loughton are both attentive, sensitive and uncomfortably aware of how privileged they are – particularly in contrast to people like Oaten’s host, who spends a third of her disposable income on cigarettes (‘my only pleasure’, she explained – echoes there of John Reid).

So, are there any lessons? We all know how odd and out-of-favour many MPs are considered to be, not least by the media. We also know how tough life is for those left behind by the rest of society – poor families, drug addicts and single teenage mothers, and all the rest. Certainly there’s nothing wrong with bringing the harsh reality of life on council estates a lot closer to Channel 4’s viewers. The problem for me is that Tower Block of Commons adds little new; it’s a freak-show – or, worse, a soap opera – with uncomfortable MPs and disgruntled poor people as the unwitting stars. Yes, it’s entertaining, but it just leaves me feeling… empty.

Had Channel 4 spent some time looking in detail at failing schools in poor communities, the welfare dependency trap, Britain’s shocking level of drug addiction, absent fathers and other contributors to social breakdown, the programme could be so, so much more than the pathos-laden melodrama it appears to be. Of course, however, in exposing those problems – and shedding light on Labour’s abject failure to grip them – it would be straying into serious politics, rather than busting a gut to show how odd, out-of-touch and wealthy are the MPs who should be doing something about life in those awfully dispiriting estates. Worse still – it might actually teach us something.

We couldn’t have that, now, could we?