TV Eye: It's a dirty job...

NZ Herald

10 Aug, 2011 09:30 PM4 mins to read

Grand Designs presenter Kevin McCloud's accomodations in India weren't of the standard he's accustomed to. Photo / Supplied

That daftly optimistic Grand Designs chap, Kevin McCloud, has decided to live in a slum for two weeks (Slumming It, Saturdays, 7.30pm, TV3.) Some people will do anything to get away from architects.

He goes, not just to any old slum - surely there was one around the corner in whatever corner of leafy England he lives in - but to Dharvai, the biggest slum in the world where a million people live on top of a rubbish tip and alongside open sewers and drains bubbling with toxic chemical waste and human faeces.

This is what is known as a conceit, or a gimmick, and no television travel show is made without one. Michael Palin was at it with Around the World in 80 Days, and that was broadcast in 1989.

Fair enough - you need some sort of imposed narrative device to tell a story on television, hence Slumming It. And just about everything has been done before (so in 80 Days Palin was following in the footsteps of Phileas Fogg, who took a wager to go around the world in, yep, 80 days. That he was a fictional character in the Jules Verne book just made the jape even jollier.) Anyway, Kev is not following in anyone's footsteps as far as I know - although it is quite likely that Slumdog Millionaire (a fiction shot in part in a real place: Dharvai) was an inspiration. Although why anyone would, for any reason, wake up one day, inspired, thinking: "I know, I'll go and live in a slum for two weeks," is beyond me.

It is entirely possible that he never thought any such thing and that some TV exec woke up one morning and thought: "I know, let's send Kevin McCloud to live in a slum for two weeks. And if we get really lucky a rat'll go up his trousers."

You can't just say - at least, if you are the BBC, you can't just say, "hey, let's send that Grand Designs fellow to live in a slum in the hope that a rat runs up his trousers because that would be sure to be a ratings winner". You have to have a worthy reason for the voyeuristic pursuit that is going to stick your cameras - and Kev's poor, about to be assaulted nose - into poor people's houses (mostly, as there are also millionaires living in the slum).

So let's set this up as a sociological nosey into how poor people live. Dharvai, apparently, has been studied and praised by those people who design cities, and exclaimed over by Prince Charles as an example of what community living could be. Although, as Kevin points out, Charlie hasn't sold Highgrove and high-tailed it to Dharvai, now, has he?

All this talk of a slum as a vibrant, happy community from which we can learn much, he says, smacks of hypocrisy. This is nifty. You couldn't accuse Kev of hypocrisy because he's actually gone to live in the slum for two weeks. His worthy experience pretty much begins with crap: a kid pooing on what passes as a footpath. He asks the guide whether he accepts this as normal. "Absolutely."

Oh, look, there's a rat. "It doesn't look healthy to me," says Kev. "Oh. Christ. What's this?" This is toxic sludge. "Oh good God!" he says, in the tones of a chap attempting not to dry heave. Here's another kid doing his business and a cat, looking hungry, and some more toxic sludge. He tried hard, with a variation on the, "the people may be poor, but look, they're terribly happy" line that enables people to go tourist-ing about in poor places and feel good about going.

He even manages to keep this up after the director points out that the accompaniment to all this happiness is a woman vomiting out of a window. A window in the house Kev is slumming it in. Then the rat comes. It comes in the night and if it doesn't quite go up his trousers, it seemed rather interested in them.