Bunker Gold: Harsh Reality – How TV Shaped Modern Britain

Listen back to an edition from our archives with The Bunker Gold. This week, after Tory leadership hopefuls Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss went head-to-head in fiery TV debates, we’ve chosen an episode from December 2021, Harsh Reality – How TV Shaped Modern Britain. 

We treat TV as the most disposable art form – but for decades it has shaped our world more than we know. From Big Brother to Shameless to Little Britain and Benefit Street, television chose the winners and losers of consumer capitalism, made it OK to sneer at the underclass, and then allowed that underclass a token comeback or two. Author Phil Harrison explores television’s innate cruelty, class dynamics and political subtext in The Age Of Static: How TV Explains Modern Britain. Has TV made our politics worse? And should it just give up on live political interviews altogether? 

• “A show called Britain’s Hardest Worker pitted benefit claimants against one another. You wouldn’t have written that in a dystopian fantasy.”
• “Maybe the BBC needs to be in that permanent state of conflict or it’s not doing its job of challenging what we think.”
• “When Mentorn took over Question Time they promised ‘adrenaline-fuelled Thursday nights’. Is that the purpose of a serious news show?”
• “Nadine Dorries as a kamikaze Culture Secretary scares the hell out of me.” 

Written and presented by Justin Quirk. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Producers: Jelena Sofronijevic and Jacob Archbold. Audio production by Robin Leeburn. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. THE BUNKER is a Podmasters Production.

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