Reality TV elimination shows used to dangle carrots worth grabbing. Pop stardom, perhaps, or financial advancement of some sort. At the very least, the chance to spend some quality time with Sir Alan Sugar. Furthermore, there was a time when TV knew what worked as entertainment and what needed to be treated seriously. But a line has been crossed this week – and in gobsmacking style. Britain’s Hardest Workers, a new BBC reality show set at the sharp end of the nation’s minimum wage economy, manages to be simultaneously quotidian and unfathomably aberrant.

Britain is facing a crisis of low wages and job insecurity. The prevailing social and economic conditions have created a buyer’s market, in which less scrupulous employers can drive down wages, offer zero-hour contracts and discard workers as they see fit. The reasons for this are a matter for the economics pages – or perhaps for a penetrating documentary of the type the BBC could once be relied upon to make.

Instead, they bring us this. According to presenter Anita Rani, Britain’s Hardest Workers is “a unique social experiment”. In fact, it’s a competitive reality show in which real, actual minimum-wage jobseekers do real, actual minimum wage work on TV and are eliminated, one by one.

What are we learning here? That people can earn minimum wage for hours of picking broccoli – then still get the sack at the end of it? Photograph: Laurél Alleyne/BBC/Twenty Twenty

What are we learning via this experiment? That people can earn £23.43 for nearly four hours of sorting through excrement-strewn rubbish, picking broccoli or cleaning, against the clock, hotel rooms recently vacated by stag parties and still get the sack at the end of it? That some people are forced to make desperate choices and end up being exploited accordingly? We’ve all heard of Sports Direct. “Aren’t some jobs so basic that they don’t deserve to pay more than the minimum wage?” asks Rani at one point. Charming. There is nothing wrong with any of these jobs; most of us will have done similar at some time in our lives. It shouldn’t be contentious to say that they should be fairly rewarded and some sort of security in-built. Crucially, they also shouldn’t be reduced to the status of spectacle.



But this is what’s so pernicious about Britain’s Hardest Workers. As life begins to imitate art, the show implies that the basement level of the UK job market now conforms pretty much exactly to the template of the competitive reality show. Everyone grafts their arse off. Tears are shed. However slim the reward might seem (the winner gets a year’s salary at living wage), everyone clambers over everyone else to get a touch. The difference is, there’s no dream being sold here. This is real life.

No more Alan Sugar … reality TV elimination shows used to dangle carrots worth grabbing. Photograph: Tom Dymond/BBC/Twenty Twenty

The show also seems to suggest that we should accept this state of affairs. Yes, there are some derisory inserts during which Rani wonders, with the help of trade union spokespeople and economists, how we came to this. But they’re mere window dressing; a fig leaf strategically positioned to legitimise the sight of Southport fisherman Kevin (whose declining industry has left him living on less than £8,000 a year) struggling frantically against the clock to make a hotel bed.

It feels like we’ve arrived at some sort of nadir. But these journeys are always incremental: we’ve got here via an oddly connected assortment of shows – The Apprentice to The Fairy Jobmother, Benefits Street to Benefits Britain 1949 – which have enshrined ruthless self-interest, encouraged scorn at perceived fecklessness, diminished mutual solidarity and prompted eager participation in a race to the bottom. Well, we’re there now – and it doesn’t feel good.

• Britain’s Hardest Workers begins Monday 22 August at 7pm on BBC2 and continues at 7pm every night until 26 August.

