Sign Of The Times

When the recession hit back in December 2007 many were hit hard by the banking failures. It wasn’t long before men and women were out of the job and businesses were struggling. Seven years later, the shadow of the recession still looms over Great Britain and has severely affected the job market. In fact, around 20% of young people (men and women between the age of 16 and 25) are unemployed. This is the highest rate of unemployment since 1997. With youth unemployment costing £4.7 billion a year, few could laugh at the situation... Few with the exception of BBC 3!

Invasion of the Job Snatchers is a six part series that chronicles unemployed young men and women competing for jobs in the town of Christchurch. In the current job market this seemed to me like a poor idea for television; on paper it seemed sure to irk and irritate as well as make light of what is honestly a dire situation in the United Kingdom.  The difference between a programme like Invasion of the job Snatchers and the X Factor is the latter programme deals in hopes and dreams. With the amount of TV talent shows on air these days it is arguable that we, as an audience, have become somewhat desensitised to the shattering of peoples hopes and dreams. A failure to achieve a dream does not shock. Invasion of the job Snatchers instead deals in people’s livelihoods and to see someone fail to achieve a job is truly worrying. When a Britain’s got talent or X Factor contestant is voted off or otherwise loses it is not the end of their job. Very rarely does a runner up or contestant fail to achieve some small musical or entertainment career, One Direction being a primer example of this. When the young people who took part in Invasion of the Job Snatchers left the show there was a strong sense that they would continue to struggle to find work. One contestant named Benny Cracknell, a flamboyant and eccentric but hard working employee, failed to get a job simply because there was not one available for him, a sad fact about today’s job market. Other contestants included Carl Owen, a young man with a criminal record who had lived on the streets as a homeless youth, and Adam Pike, who had been made redundant and could not find work due to his lack of qualifications.

I did however find that I enjoyed the programme. It was extremely cathartic to see contestants such as the single father Sean Blain succeed and gain his job in a garden centre. It was also easy to relate with some of the employer’s anger and irritation; for example the contestant Rachel was continuously late managed to cry her way into a job before throwing away the contract she was offered at the end of the programme. The programme did raise a few important issues however. The youth of today really did seem to have an issue with laziness, rudeness, and sense of entitlement. Though some candidates were obviously picked to juxtapose the conservative town of Christchurch and create a conflict, Britain's youth came across as utterly hopeless and unemployable for the most part. Perhaps BBC 3 didn’t create an entertainment show, but instead have present us with a cutting edge social study.