The Medium is Not Enough

In the UK: Wednesdays, 9pm, Channel 4

There’s a sort of mini-trend going on at Channel 4. For years, it’s been filling our airwaves with reality shows disguised as documentaries, in which various not especially nice people with overly developed senses of entitlement shout at each other a lot (cf Wife Swap, Big Brother, et al). Aware that that does nothing for its public service remit, eventually leads to Celebrity Big Brother and risks making Gordon Brown acutely aware of the word ‘privatisation’, the channel that likes to say ‘Aaah! You slag!’ has decided to reverse that with some documentaries disguised as reality shows.

For some reason, all these documentaries have the word ‘millionaire’ in their title. Last year, we had Secret Millionaire, in which various moneybags went undercover for a week or two in the poorer parts of Britain in an effort to locate needy types deserving of rewards and give them a great big wodge of cash – as well as find the place that would benefit the entire community most if it received a cash injection. There’ll be a second series soon, although how they’re going to keep it a secret this time, I don’t know.

Now we have Millionaires’ Mission, which is a somewhat brighter but also somewhat loopier idea. Rather than try to do the whole thing undercover and just put £10k into a local community centre or something, a group of eight millionaires will appear rather obviously in a community, live there for a while, then come up with ideas to kickstart the local economy that charity organisations might have missed. Let them help themselves, as one of the slogans almost goes. That’s the smarter idea.

Trouble is, when you get eight bosses, none of whom know each other, and then you ship them off to Uganda for three weeks, it’s never going to go smoothly, now is it?

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