Up For Hire: Episode Two

BBC Three18.10.11

A contemplative jobseeker is fired from his chair by Bacon
Tonight's episode starts with a barrage of X Factor-imported catcalls and cheers. YES! It's the guy who created Innocent Smoothies! Woop-woop! Bizarrely, he is placed beside Andi Osho and Katie Hopkins. It seems to be the guest set-up for this series: a comedian, an entrepreneur, and a former reality TV star. All three overlap so much that it is difficult to say which is which.
Richard Bacon overstates the importance of Up For Hire by claiming the Internet "exploded" after last night's episode. At most, there were a few hundred tweets – comparable with any other programme, apart from maybe the overwhelmingly popular Zumba Party Fitness on QVC. Nevertheless, he says it direct to camera, so chillingly overlord that it is necessary to believe him. "Is your degree worthless?" he demands. Yes, sir, it is. And that is the theme of tonight's episode: not is your degree worthless, but your degree is worthless.
Young people from the audience are interviewed in the BBC television studios, the majority of whom claim their media-related degrees have got them nowhere; media degrees are mocked in front of abashed graduates; and Mickey Mouse's name is cried with as much hysteria as someone confronted by one of the skittering non-cartoon beasties. Never does anyone champion the actual purpose of university: to learn. Nor does anyone suggest that perhaps a degree in video production might actually be quite useful when pursuing a career in, well, video production. Obviously the only real way to get a job with a degree would be if society started churning out production-lines of doctors. But then who would produce videos of it?
Presenting knowledge itself, in whatever form it may take – red-brick or Russell – as an unimportant asset in this garish BBC3-pink bubble is more than slightly dispiriting.
Unexpectedly, the only moderately sane voice is Katie Hopkins: cutting through her knee-jerk assumptions about red-brick universities (specifically the deplorable "blow yourself up" line), she launches into a proper scathing attack on the government and how it is them who have messed up so horribly, horribly wrong. Not the young people, as this show keeps insinuating, but the government. How refreshing! She was quickly silenced – which was sad, because her impassioned speech took her halfway across the studio floor and Bacon seemed confused as to how she'd got there. A bit like her tenure on The Apprentice, to be fair.
So far, Up For Hire is a well-intentioned but vapid series. I may be biased, however, because their tie-in BBC Lab employability test rather pessimistically scored my self-efficacy as present-fatalistic. But then, I knew they'd say that, so what is the point?

Up For Hire: Episode One

BBC Three
17.10.11


Will someone give poor Alice a hug?

With more urgent questions than a personal claims advert, BBC3's twitter feed cries: "Have you ever been told off by a boss at work? Do you feel you've been unfairly criticised? Or should bosses be tough? Discuss #upforhire". It only just misses out on, "Call Claims Direct today for your free no-obligation quote!" The message of this tweet is strangely allegorical, if you like to shoehorn things into allegories and write blog entries about them.

Imagine, if you will, your boss: a robotic man with a tendency to snap at the slightest provocation in order to look halfway professional. An example of poor micro-management, his every movement is controlled via an earpiece telling him precisely what to do, where and when. Defying the voices is so terrifying a prospect that he quakes in his tiny boots and nervously charges through all scheduled topics, shrieking at juniors on his way to the blissful finishing line and cheque. To please the voices in his ear, he will counter an audience member's contribution at inxplicable moments, verbally collaring them to bark "Why?" in their faces in an attempt to make them sweat and produce the golden egg of "good TV". It's Richard Bacon, of course. He is, for allegorical purposes, the boss of BBC3's Up For Hire.

When he's not snacking on beer and pizza with celebrities who all share the same agent, Bacon seems determined to promote himself as a knightly advocate of young people's justice. His presenting stints on this and Question Tiemz (Young Voter's Question Time, for we are not worthy of the grown-up version on the big channel) are evidence that he might help his noble crusade if only he could stop Paxmaning them.

But that doesn't stop him, and this programme, from attacking the very people they're trying to help. Four young jobseekers with no tangible desire to work in a theme park are, for a reason some TV exec considered good, whisked off to work in a theme park:

Graduate: I studied journalism. I want to be a journalist.
Manager: Be a clown.
Graduate: I don't want to work for Paul Dacre.
Manager: Why are you eating ice cream?
Graduate: I've been working 16 hours straight with a 3-minute break every 10 hours. I'm hungry!
Manager: I don't care. Dance for the children.
Graduate: *sad dance*
Everyone in the studio: LOL AT YOUR EXPECTATIONS IN LIFE.

The wannabe journalist insists she has contributed to her fair share of unpaid work experience and menial labour, but, as this show is unnecessarily live, her argument isn't a carefully nuanced slap-down of the complex issues underlying the current graduate jobs sector. Instead, she is greeted with a Monty Python-like one-upmanship of tragic former jobs by a random selection of well-known faces:

Businesswoman: I am a businesswoman. When I was your age, I was 20.
Comedian with stupid hair: I am the comedian du jour. When I was your age, I was a Rich Tea Biscuit, and I never once complained about getting dunked in boiling hot water and digested.
Former X Factor contestant: I am the face of discounted Iceland produce. When I was your age, I used to sing quite well.

The graduate is thereby humiliated on TV for being something of an idealist and rejecting this notion that one should shovel pony excrement after shelling out ~£15k for a degree. The message, for all that there is, seems to be "put up and shut up". Yes, graduates: you were missold a dream of big jobs after extra years of further study, but that's okay because Richard Bacon once flipped burgers in the 90s and is now a big-name TV star.

There is something quite crucial missing from the contributors' insights into their former pre-celebrity lives, and that is the significance of era. The jobs market when Michelle Mone left school is not the same beast that it is nowadays – even in terms of method, with the rise of online applications and recruitment services – so to compare her it-never-did-me-any-harm experiences with a current jobseeker is without point.

However, the main issue with the programme is that no one is actually paying attention to the jobseekers. Whether it's Bacon cutting (slicing?) over everyone, or celebrities glorifying their own hardship, or the editor squashing everything into a squidge of a narrative and scapegoating the young people themselves, no one in a position of authority takes the time to listen to what is being told time and time again. Even the wall behind the co-presenter, outlining jobseekers' complaints, is only once glanced over. Many of them direct blame at external forces (where are the jobs?), causing the co-presenter to paraphrase the problem several times as "It's not our fault." This is never expanded upon, mostly because it's true... but also because it's more fun to attack the jobseekers instead and make an example of them, the lazy so-and-sos.

So far, unpaid internships have been championed rather than questioned; the government appears not to exist, nor does the entriely revlevant Labour policy of giving everyone in Britain a degree; and their montage of helpful advice managed to be more patronising than an actual careers service, where "dnt use txt spk" was considered a valid example of improving your chances of getting a job. If people have managed to successfully type their CVs nt lk dis yet still fail to secure employment, then something might just be amiss, and, y'know, that could be worth talking about?

Here's a summary for you: you've gotta have experience to get experience, and round and round we go on this stupid merry-go-round of want and need. That's not even mentioning the unspoken practise of nepotism and how it's easier for someone from a superior socio-economic background to bag a better job. But then, TV wouldn't want to talk about that...

I hope Up For Hire becomes more in-depth about this and does not try, as it has thus far, to disguise the fact that the job market is in the shit by instructing us all to lower our own expectations. But hey, this is BBC3, and Russell Kane probably has a new tour to promote or something.

So, with regards to BBC3's tweet, unfair criticism? Yes. Jobseekers just received it in spades. As this is only episode one, many downtrodden viewers who tuned in expecting the semblance of hope will wisely refuse to watch more. The condescending advice and propagandist pitchforks against those expecting a little more out of their degree will have alienated a majority of non-masochistic young people. I, however, am a fully fledged masochist. And I'm up for hire.