Caught a bit of BBC1's Trawlermen last night. It's an old fashioned straight documentary about trawlers operating out of Peterhead. The weather turns from fair to foul in an instant. Modern navigation and tracking devices mean that as soon as they find fish so does everybody else and they get traffic jams in the middle of the North Sea. One of their competitors comes back with a decent haul and makes enough to pay each member of the crew £1,200. That's for ten days at sea.Contrast with the kids on BBC3's Sweet 16 who are doing their GCSEs at a fairly tough school in Tottenham. All their dreams seem to be painfully out of whack with their actual prospects. The career plan of the lad last night was simple to "be famous" and he travelled to Turkey to sort out the one thing he felt was holding him back, his nose. One of the girls, when asked to describe her friends, said they were "popular and pretty". The boy tonight wants to be a rapper. Watch it.
the other refreshing thing about this programme was that it wasn't in and of the media. It didn't have the depressing pall of the post modern about it. It was a film about trawler men who worked hard to catch fish and went home. The were no celebrities involved, no phone votes, it even avoided stupid titles like "booze britain" or "super vets"
ReplyDeleteChris Deptford