Channel 4's Best and Worst (1/2) By Mark Pollard

(1/2), (2/2).

Last night's (Tuesday 9th August 2005) Channel 4 aired a programme which listed the ten best and ten worst places to live in the UK. It was one of the most ill-researched, unbalanced and downright irresponsible pieces of television that I have seen for many years. I used to regard Channel 4 as being a bit like BBC2 with adverts; unfortunately, they seem to be moving ever-closer to Channel 5 territory with their increasingly low-brow output.

I was born and raised in the Hull area. However, I have lived in other parts of the country - Middlesbrough and Cardiff, to name the two places that I have spent the most time in other than Hull - and found them to be no better than my hometown. In fact I would argue that, although I grew to love the place and its people during my years there, Middlesbrough has far less to commend it than Hull, other than Premiership football and the proximity of the North York Moors.

But this is not really the point - deciding how good or bad a place is to live is a complex, fluid process, open to all sorts of external and internal factors, as well as the interpretation of the viewer or listener. This makes comparison between different places not only difficult, but pretty pointless. In fact, the only point to it is if you happen to have some kind of axe to grind with a place and you want to reinforce its existing, negative stereotypes. Which is exactly how last night's programme looked.

Where were the interviews and opinions? Why didn't the programme makers speak to people who'd had experience of living in Hull as well as other comparable cities? You can't slam a place in this manner, on national television, without giving the opportunity for due recourse along the way. It was city-wide character-assassination of the highest, meanest order. Disgraceful.

Let me give you an example of the so-called research that the makers of this programme carried out. I believe a Channel 4 researcher contacted thisisull.com, asking them for stories about the how bad things were in the city. Their agenda was clear enough; a hatchet job on an easy old target. There was no proper research: instead, the programme makers appeared to rely on a load of inaccurate and misleading government statistics on education, crime, health and wealth, with little or no regard for their infamous vagueness and lack of reliability or credence.

What's more, they were trotted out in the usual sneering, superior tones by a couple of geographically indistinct twerps who clearly wouldn't understand social urban geographical issues if they were placed in front of them. Which they were, actually - how ironic that much of their damning indictment was delivered from The Land Of Green Ginger, one of the most uniquely beautiful, fascinating and historic parts of Hull's Old Town.

If the programme makers had done the level of research that should be mandatory for any piece expecting prime-time national exposure, they would soon have discovered that Hull's most educated, peaceful, healthiest and wealthiest suburbs, to the west of the city, are actually chopped off and included within the boundary of the neighbouring East Riding of Yorkshire County Council. This situation is unique.

No other UK city of comparable size is so unfairly bounded - something I know to be a fact as a result of the research I conducted while I was a Lecturer in Human Geography at Teesside Tertiary College, Middlesbrough, between 1995 and 1999. However, this crucial boundary issue was not even mentioned. No surprise, I guess: it would only have got in the way of a good, easy-to-tell story, wouldn't it? But the fact is, if Hull's connected suburbs of Hessle, Anlaby, Kirkella, Willerby and Cottingham were brought into the city boundary, as they surely should be, and as they are in other cities, Hull would become just another medium-sized city with some problematic inner areas and council estates, same as all the others.

Continued ....Next page (2/2),

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