Just the Job

Society is crumbling, young people are running amok and TV is decaying morality as we know it.





Apparently.

Some boffins at the Learning and Skills Council, the people that are responsible for making sure we all have qualifications and skills to get better jobs, claim that soap operas are not performing some fictitious social obligation that they have just invented.
The LSC are not happy that many of the younger characters in Britain's two most popular soaps are depicted in occupations such as market trading, pint-pulling, or knicker manufacturing.

In Eastenders, the BBC soap is based in a London market square and so, logically, some of the characters work on the local market. In ITV's Coronation Street, the largest employer is a factory called "Underworld" and so most of the residents work there.

But according to the Learning Skills Council, seeing actors "in dead-end jobs is shattering young viewers' career dreams". As a result, the LSC believe that because these "role models" are in these "dead-end jobs", the youth of today will just accept that as the norm and to combat that, they suggest what qualifications these characters should be working towards.
They just happen to ignore that in real life, the sort of jobs that might be classed as 'bad jobs', such as retail or bar work are usually done by young people, be it to pay their way through higher education (like myself) or to make a start on the career ladder.
They also ignore the fact that if a character did achieve a 'Level 2 Diploma in retail fashion' and went on to own a 'successful designer fashion boutique', they'd be living in a nice detached house in an upmarket leafy suburb, not a terraced estate in Salford.

Interestingly, this comes not that long ago since the government wanted to keep young people who don't want to be in school in school for another two years to stop them going into these so called "dead-end jobs".

Firstly, lets remember that a properly functioning society will always need people to empty the bins, stack supermarket shelves and drive buses and so it's both impractical and impossible to keep people out of such jobs.
The simple fact is that we can't all be rocket scientists or brain surgeons. A bin-man (or as they are now called, a "Refuse Technician"), isn't a bin-man because he likes looking through other people's rubbish, he's a bin-man because he doesn't know much about rocket science or brain surgery.

Secondly, lets go back to the LSC's dig at soaps and the claim that "Young people in soaps are role models, and if they remain in dead end jobs there is a danger that young people will accept this as the norm."
These soaps also happen to be the same programmes that Ofcom recently made exempt from the new legislation on junk food advertising because only 9% of the audience were under the age of sixteen and so to claim that soap stars are 'role models' to young people or that young people are affected by seeing people working in an underwear factory is entirely inaccurate.

Did I just hear the sound of a buck being passed?