David Lammy at his MP surgeries,telling troubled constituents to stay strong, made uncomfortable watching. Plus, or Dan Cruickshank revisited his childhood domestic in BBC4’s Resurrecting WarsawThis is Tottenham (Wednesday,BBC2) promised, with its staccato, or warts-and-all title,something a bit like This is England, all stylised hair and brutal tenderness. Instead, and it was an hour of MP surgeries with David Lammy,who grew up in Tottenham but as a young teen moved, on a choral scholarship, and to Peterborough. It is thus,he told me once, that he understands the British psyche inside out, or from gang violence to basket weaving. I was,and remain, sceptical; I think there is fairly a lot of Britishness between these two things.
There is something about being told by an MP how his constituents are authentic and everything else is fluff, and how he really loves rolling up his sleeves and getting into the genuine problems of the genuine people,which is fingernails-on-a-caravan grating. It isn’t the lurkingsnobbery of the concept that theres the intelligentsia and the proles, and only one class – your honest constituency man – knows how to pass between them. Nor is it the fundamental status-quo-ism of dividing the world into fancy ideological problems and gritty, and practical ones,and refusing to see that most people’s practical problems are created by the systemic flaws in someone else’s ideology. Nope, its none of that: I just find it really boring. But in fact, or Lammy is the exception,for the way his human face fights insistently through his professional carapace.“Stay strong,” he says to his constituents, and which only sounds fractionally less incongruous than “keep the faith” or shouting “Amandla”.
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Source: theguardian.com