It’s actually quite difficult to know where to begin with this – with people who don’t know they’re born, who don’t know about human suffering and who don’t understand anything other than their own desultory, vapid existence – and even struggle with that.
This mini-series was made as part of BBC3’s Thread project – a worthwhile but not-very-well-publicised campaign for eco-clothing and fair trade. It’s not something I’m particularly interested in, as it happens. I describe my own style, my own personal sartorial vibe as ‘tramp de la jour’ or ‘affluent curmudgeon’. Basically, I tend to find clothes in dustbins and discarded in puddles so that I end up looking like a tramp who’s one rung up from rock bottom. Despite this detachment, it’s hard not to applaud any movement that attempts to grab those twats who spend two hundred quid in Primark every weekend by the shoulders and shake so much sense into them that their brains haemmorhage.
I remember the glory days when fashion would only take up a couple of pages in a newspaper at a maximum, once a week. Now it’s dripping off every current affairs periodical, with comment, discussion, adulation and piss-taking in every margin of every wretched page. I couldn’t tell you why. Fashion is the the most pointless of all industries. It’s people dressing idiotically in the vain hope they might catch another idiot’s eye for five minutes. And after that five minutes is up, the look becomes ’so five minutes ago’, making the whole exercise more transient than a transit van going at full pelt along an empty runway.
So – and I think we all agree on this – even a tiny smudge of a passing interest in anything to do with fashion is the mark of an idiot. With this in mind, let us look at the central premise of Blood, Sweat and T Shirts.
Six Westerners, all of them fashion victims, are sent over to India to see how their garments are made. The four parts take us in sequence from the higher class of factory in episode one (still paying workers a pittance, but at least hygenic and safe) to, as I write, part three which took our travellers to a cotton plantation where they picked the cotton buds from the source, before working to gather it and bundle it. Living conditions are very, very basic and work is hard, strenuous work. Part four will hopefully see them losing a hand in some rusty machinery because, to a man, these are the worst group of snivelling idiots you could ever hope to see. And three of them are particularly odious examples of the offspring our nation is plopping out.
Okay, so Georgina is just a little bit thick. Fair enough, Stacey is your unremarkable airhead, and at least she puts in a bit of work. I’ll admit that Tara actually appears to be learning something from the experience – so fair play for that. It doesn’t make them any more likeable, but I admire the fact they got involved.
Despite these three showing, at last, some vestige of being adjusted and functioning, the remaining three are grade ‘A’ arseholes. Irredeemable twats. Especially Richard. By Christ, especially Richard.
First off, Amrita is a spoiled little rich girl who I believe is of second generation Indian ethnicity. Ok, so that might be too distant for her to feel genuine empathy for people from her own background, but still it was surprising to see her slagging off the natives of the country where her ancestors were born for being ‘dirty’ and ‘rude’. In fact, I’ll go further. It was fucking disgusting and she should be beaten with a fucking stick for her callous twattishness. She’s a posh little devil who honestly thinks she deserves the priviledge she was born into. Last night, after working in the cotton field for five minutes, she was delighted her eczema flared up, meaning she couldn’t continue and had to go back to the flat they were renting to do fuck all.
Slightly less irritating, but only because he’s so thick he’s unaware of what his huge, farting gob is going on about, is Mark. Mark lives with his Mum and is clearly unable to do anything for himself. At times Mark has put some effort in but he tends to throw tantrums the minute anyone touches him. He also dresses like any clone who walks out of Next or Top Man and he talks in mono-syllables. Luckily, he’s quite easy to ignore. Unlike Richard.
Richard wants to look like Alex Zane (fuck knows why), and he pulls this off – he too looks like a berk. But where Alex Zane is presumably capable of logical thought, Richard is a toothy, weepy, fuckhead with nothing going for him whatsoever. Apparently he runs his own ad agency and is on fifty grand a year (must be a small ad agency then) – but I refuse to believe this on the basis that he is utterly, utterly stupid. The world has never known stupidity like this. Seriously.
The object of this show is to replicate the experience of your average sweatshop worker – and even then I’m sure they’ve sanitised it somewhat. When Richard felt a little bit tired, in the middle of a crowded cafe, he began a tirade against the dirty, disgusting, rude, peasants he worked amongst (his words, not mine). He was so loud, he disturbed those around him, one man in particular took offence (and rightly so) and attempted to assuage the anger, only to receive more hot air from the stupid cunt.
Richard’s threatened to leave a few hundred times and I’m sure I’m not alone when I wish he’d just piss off and leave the others to it. He’s incapable of learning anything about Indian culture and he refuses to engage with the workers. His reasons for feeling no sympathy for the workers early on was that they, he reasoned, could surely find a way out of the slums. Citing his own climb to ‘the top’, he said that any man could make their own way in the world, forgetting that he comes from one of the wealthiest countries in the world and was surely given more than a leg up from his old man. Even the slightest bit of research would tell you that these people have no choice. You don’t even need evidence, Richard! Look around you!
To add to this, he also didn’t realise cotton comes from plants. Richard is the personification of our idiot youth – that percentage of our kids who are over-exposed, over-priviledged and who deserve to be flogged.
The final episode is next week. For editorial purposes, there’ll be the inevitable end of ‘the journey’ tears and a montage of edits wherein all the participants are shown to have learned something. Don’t believe it. Amrita and Richard in particular are learning fuck all. They haven’t got the capacity to see beyond their own material, pointless lives. They’re dumbed down dickheads and they should be left to survive in the slums. They haven’t an ounce of the dignity of the people they work around in this series, and if left to their own devices in that environment, minus camera crews and production staff, they’d be trying to eat their own shit and living in trees, so devoid are they of common sense.
You might be able to tell, this show upsets me a little bit. The final edit is trying to tell its own story – of six youngsters realising where their easily gained possessions come from. But the programme does more than that, as despite attempts to cover over the cracks, what we actually see is a handful of pig-headed twats realising nothing and revealing everything that’s bad about our throwaway culture. At least, for an hour per week, we get to see them suffer.
