Benefits Street

At the moment, Channel 4 has a documentary series called “Benefits Street”, based around one road in Birmingham where the majority of its inhabitants are – yes! – on benefits.

It’s pretty standard C4 documentary fare, and follows on from others in similar vein, including “Skint” (families in Scunthorpe who are – yes! – on benefits) and so on. And as with the other similar ones, it got Twitter, Facebook, and the media in general up in arms. The fact that all this makes for great free advertising for the programme (because people want to watch it and see what everyone else is talking about) is of course purely coincidental.

No, of course Channel4 aren’t trolling media and social media in order to boost their own viewing figures. Of course not. *cough*

I didn’t bother with it – I know pretty much what it’ll show, they’ll focus on “human interest” stories within the street, edit it to within an inch of its life, show all the stereotypes, the ‘boss’ of the street, people shoplifting, drug-growing/dealing ‘to make ends meet’ and all the rest of it.

The thing that annoyed me the most about the entire hysteria though was that people started a petition to stop Channel 4 from showing the rest of the series.  Which is inherently pointless. The programme’s been made, it’s all over and done with. Hiding it away is effectively no different to hiding away the issues of people who are on benefits.  More importantly, it’ll make it into more of a talking point, and boost viewing figures.

If you don’t like this kind of programme, there’s a simple answer. Don’t watch it. Don’t promote it. Don’t talk about it, don’t link to it. Don’t bitch about it. But most importantly – don’t watch it. There’s plenty of other channels and programmes.  Channel4 is funded by its advertisers – by the people who want to promote their goods/products within the programme and the ad breaks. The more a programme is viewed, the more Channel4 can charge those advertisers.

If you don’t watch the programme, it doesn’t get viewers. And Channel4 won’t bother making more of a set of programmes that lose money, that don’t have viewers, and they’ll do something else instead.

It really is that simple.