Just when you think the mainstream media is all 'mindless thugs' this and 'dole scum' that, along comes a programme that gives you a glimpse of what a media that didn't relentlessly attack the poorest and most marginalised social groups might look like. This evening's Jamelia: Shame about Single Mums on BBC3 was a very worthy contribution to celebrity social issues television, exploring the historical oppression and stigmatisation of single mothers and the vilification and scapegoating of single parents in the mass media.
The programme's most relishable moment was the encounter between the singer Jamelia (herself a single mother of two daughters) and the rent-a-mouth reactionary Julia Hartley-Brewer, who posited that single parenthood, while not exactly bad, was 'not desirable'. Jamelia kept her cool in the interview, but later pointed out that single parents are not always single by choice (and when they are, we should add, their choice ought not to be patronisingly denigrated as 'undesirable'). The most moving part of the documentary was undoubtedly Jamelia's interview with a lady who, as an unmarried teenager in the 1960s, had been made to give up her child for adoption.
While the programme hardly counterbalanced the conservatism of many other BBC3 reality shows, such asYoung, Dumb and Living Off Mum, it did at least go some way towards disrupting the right-wing moralists' post-riots offensive against 'broken homes' and single parent families. Go Jamelia.
The programme's most relishable moment was the encounter between the singer Jamelia (herself a single mother of two daughters) and the rent-a-mouth reactionary Julia Hartley-Brewer, who posited that single parenthood, while not exactly bad, was 'not desirable'. Jamelia kept her cool in the interview, but later pointed out that single parents are not always single by choice (and when they are, we should add, their choice ought not to be patronisingly denigrated as 'undesirable'). The most moving part of the documentary was undoubtedly Jamelia's interview with a lady who, as an unmarried teenager in the 1960s, had been made to give up her child for adoption.
While the programme hardly counterbalanced the conservatism of many other BBC3 reality shows, such asYoung, Dumb and Living Off Mum, it did at least go some way towards disrupting the right-wing moralists' post-riots offensive against 'broken homes' and single parent families. Go Jamelia.
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