Channel 4’s new flagship series is essentially a census on prejudice masquerading as a reality TV/game show hybrid. A £300,000 property is being given away in the undeniably pretty village of Grassington in the north Yorkshire Dales, the kind of place where “you have to have at least three generations in the graveyard to be a local”, as one resident put it. And with three times more over-65s than the national average, Grassington's graveyard is pretty much the busiest place in the village.
Over the next eight weeks 12 families will compete for the chance to win Sycamore Cottage and live permanently in this somewhat fossilised picture postcard. In each episode two of them spend a week in the village competing head to head for votes from the local residents, before the six winners return for the chance to become permanent Grassington residents. This is another variation on the glory versus humiliation X Factor format, only with stakes somewhat higher than landing the Christmas Number One.
Rather than artistic talent, these people are being judged on the whole shebang: character, class, colour, lifestyle, personality, background. Good fun, eh? The programme makers have naturally ensured that no one in the village will be spared the opportunity to air any latent prejudices: every conceivable demographic will be covered. Future episodes feature two gay couples (one undergoing IVF treatment), a couple with Indian heritage, a plain-speaking single mum who works as a life model, New Age travellers, aspiring bourgeoisie, a young working-class family and idealistic neo-pastoralists.
Last night's opener - pitching Phillip and Simone up against Steve and Nicky (pictured right) - played the race card. It was presumably no accident that this programme was named after the now notorious 1970s sitcom in which a suburban white working-class couple unwittingly found themselves living next door to a black couple.
Those days of casual racism are gone. Or are they? The arrival in Grassington of Phillip and Simone, two black Londoners, coincided with rather a lot of talk about faces "not fitting", although one well-heeled lady felt "the Jamaicans” would assimilate just fine. Phillip was, as it happens, British-born with Nigerian parentage.
Everyone stared at them, but perhaps that's simply what happens when you're being followed around a small place by a camera crew. One man, beer bottle resting on his belly, pronounced that, “T’aint the place for ’em.” There was a steady, depressing drizzle of fear and ignorance, but any locals expecting a taste of The Wire in the land of the summer wine were swiftly forced to think again. Phillip played against lazy typecasting by being a zealous Thatcherite "in training" to become a Tory MP. He treated the quest for acceptance as though it were a general election campaign, setting up a local surgery and enthusiastically rapping on doors. The first two people who opened up to him had just suffered bereavements. When he closed the second door and giggled softly, without a trace of malice, you knew he was going to win.
Simone was less robust but equally easy to like. Seemingly more fearful of stereotypes of black culture even than the villagers, she was haunted by a vision of her three sons in 10 years' time, embroiled in big-city gun crime and gang culture. Should they win the cottage, Grassington may well prove to be several steps too far in the other direction.
In the other corner stood Steve, a bolshie 49-year-old Yorkshireman living in exile – well, Birmingham. He was a carpenter (“I can do anything wood”) looking to make a new life with his nervy, sharp girlfriend Nicky and her three lippy, stereotypically slouching teenage children. Steve raised the temperature of several local ladies of a certain age, which was ironic because both he and Nicky were fatally lacking in warmth.
They planned a house party to which no one came, while Phillip and Simone held a variety concert for "local talent" which by contrast went off like a very happy firework. This was after the two couples had made their case in the local pub (Steve: “Well, I’m from Doncaster”) and then at a kangaroo court cunningly disguised as a dinner party, with the local GP Dr Jackson relishing the role of hanging judge.
“Dr J” (pictured left) was just one of the supporting cast of characters pulled in from the local population of 1200 and no doubt mercilessly edited to fit the brief. The competition for the cottage aside, Love Thy Neighbour was yet another contrived study of rural British life, every doddering sub-Alan Bennett vignette accompanied by that irritatingly jaunty music designed to signify bumbling, backward eccentricity. We were told that, aside from “sheep wrestling” (or was it "rustling"?), there was no crime in Grassington. Do they really expect us to buy this nonsense?
There were many larks to be had with Mary and Bunty, two Hinge and Bracket types who spent long afternoons partaking in tea and indiscretion: “We’ve only got one or two little black people," said Bunty, as the director and producer presumably performed silent high-fives off camera. Throwing their inane but essentially benign witterings at the mercy of the TV cameras was only marginally less foolhardy than placing their perfectly coiffed grey heads in the mouth of a lion. Why do they do it? Don't they watch TV?
Although the opening montage hinted at a veritable orgy of prejudice porn - “No gays, no one on benefits,” one resident barked - Grassington came out of this looking no more inward-looking and ill-informed than many, many other places, although it certainly did itself no favours. In the end Phillip and Simone won 66 per cent of the vote, suggesting that the community responded to their sense of familial stability and general decency (though it was probably just Phillip's politics) rather than making a judgement based on colour. It also helped that they were up against a family with all the charm of a bee sting. By the end it looked suspiciously liked a fixed fight.
The result seemed like the right one, but if watching people being voted in and out of a community made for pretty unedifying television, seeing prurience and bias-baiting smuggled onto TV in the guise of some kind of populist social-studies experiment was even less pleasant. But what was truly chastening was how desperately these two couples wanted their lives to change, even if it meant living in dreary old Grassington, and how much they were prepared to put up with in order to make it happen. It will, I suspect, only get worse.
- Watch Love Thy Neighbour on 4oD