I'll be talking about Non-Stop Inertia at The Cowley Club in Brighton on Monday 18th April. 7.00pm, free admission, open to the public. More information here.

Stop the Clock

[Note: I finished writing this post a few hours before seeing the above picture (from http://reallyfreeschool.org/, via @RobWhite00). An encouraging sign. As far as warnings of the coming apocalypse can be encouraging, that is.]

Visiting London on 26th March for the anti-government protests, for the first time I found myself in close proximity to the Olympic Countdown Clock, that grotesque emblem of immaterial capital and PR, fake unity and compulsory inclusivity. The Clock is in many ways the ideal symbol, not just for the Olympic brand but for contemporary life as a whole; not so much a memorial as an ‘amnesial’, a monument not to an event but to a non-event, not place but placelessness, not the passing of time but its erasure.

By 6pm Trafalgar Square had resolved itself into a familiar carnival/rock-festival set-up. The space in front of Nelson’s Column was a dancefloor and marchers rested their feet on the steps of the National Gallery, watching the spectacle. The police were happy to allow people to climb the statues and decorate them with revolutionary slogans, but across the Square the Clock was practically untouched. A few people were sitting underneath it, chatting and eating, and as I watched, one of them was instructed quietly but firmly by a police officer standing some distance away to remove a tiny anti-cuts sticker which had been placed on its surface. The citizen obediently unpeeled the sticker, smiling nervously.

Could it be that because of the virtual power transmitted through its digits, the Clock also paradoxically presents itself as a target, an opportunity? This would explain its apparently sacred, totemic position. Of course the failure of the Clock to work properly after its unveiling was symptomatic of the faulty discourse of the Olympic ‘project’ and its style-over-substance marketing; and yet this apparent bumbling ineffectiveness also conveniently conceals the underlying interests which it represents - what might be termed the ‘Boris Johnson defence’. Such gimmicks have apparently been part of the Olympic tradition for years, but this particular structure, appearing at this particular time, seems to function not just as a logo for a sports tournament but as part of the ideological state apparatus. For the protests to move on to the next stage and truly upset the ruling consortium, the Clock must somehow be defeated. For the multitude to stop the Clock would be a huge symbolic act: a chance to switch off the ridiculous work-or-die admonishments of ‘Alarm Clock Britain’; to reject the all-in-this-together austerity script barked at us by our economic masters throughout our duties of somnolent commuting, stupefying labour and competitive jobseeking; to ditch the empty promise of a great corporate experience in which we could all generically ‘participate’. It would mean a historic regaining of temporal territory and an instant unplugging from the Coalition’s ‘Big Society’ Newspeak.

Indeed, the tyrannical timepiece might have been transported from the dystopian future of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, or the film Children of Men, in which downtrodden everyman Clive Owen moves through a shabby wasteland of decay and sterility in a blood-stained 2012 Olympic sweatshirt. For this is the kind of reality which the reverse-time of the Clock ominously counts down towards; the implosion of public space, the draining of life-force out of the cultural body. A noiseless, limbless clock for a silenced, immaterialized population.

What prevented me from attacking the damned thing myself? Maybe I would have felt differently if the Clock had been the locus of the demonstration, but as a marginal actor in the scene I felt restrained, not only by the watchful eyes of the police, but also more abstractly, by a kind of force field (and again, the safe distance kept from the Clock by the main body of protestors suggested that the structure operated an invisible and unconscious deterrent effect). I recognised this as the same vague constellation of fears – economic, juridical, social - which prevented me from walking out of a job I hated, or sitting in a near-empty First Class carriage on an otherwise overcrowded train. As a good neoliberal subject, I was a slave to my internalised self-disciplinary program. I knew that on its own my action would amount to nothing more than a tragicomic moment of self-destructive attention-seeking. Some sort of collective effort is needed, maybe a Fourth-Plinth-type counter-vigil to oppose the Clock’s 24/7 biopolitical discourse, with banners listing public services cut, unemployment figures, tax avoided etc., positioned prominently in front of the numerical display, directly in the line of the media/tourist gaze.

Taking my place under the Clock, I took a Biro out of my bag and scrawled across the top of the ‘No Cuts’ lollipop placard I had carried all day: ‘FUCK THE OLYMPICS’. I sat there, resting the modified sign on my shoulder. After a couple of minutes a photographer approached, knelt professionally in front of me and took a picture. He smiled and gave a thumbs-up sign – for the sentiment, or for a saleable shot, I couldn’t tell – before moving on to frame some people sitting on the steps nearby. I got up and left for the Tube.

It came as no surprise that the police onslaught aimed at the remaining protesters in Trafalgar Square later that night was triggered by a threat to the precious Clock. The force of the state was used to physically ‘contain’ those who might dare to challenge the authority of its apparatus, thereby proving that this is exactly what we must keep doing, in one way or another, in an attempt to rescue time itself from those intent on harnessing the future for their own profit.

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My book is out on 25th March, which is just as well as I can barely string a sentence together on here these days. It is a versatile text which can be used as a motivational performance-enhancing handbook, as light reading between job applications, or as fuel for a makeshift protest bonfire. The blurb is here. Many thanks to Angela at s0metim3s for the endorsement, and thanks also to those who have trailed the book on their much-more-widely-read blogs and Twitters.

The book is on sale through the usual virtual outlets. It will also be available, along with other Zero titles, in Brighton's lovely Cowley Club Bookshop, and possibly at other places too, to be confirmed. If you buy it, I hope you'll like it.

Estrangement

So, having tripped over precarity at the start of my nerve-jangling journey into understanding the experience of temporary work and 'jobseeking', I seem to have stumbled upon autonomy on the way out.

There are some interesting parallels between the themes covered in my book and those in Bifo Berardi's The Soul at Work: for instance, the power of technology to restrict as well as liberate, and the use of anxiety and debt as control mechanisms. Berardi also explores abstract areas I was wary of straying too far into as a relative novice, particularly drawing on Deleuze/Guattari to contextualise these themes.

Most strikingly, from different starting points we both arrived at the idea of re-activating resistance through adopting a position of "estrangement". Signalling another autonomist, Mario Tronti, Bifo writes:

Only the estrangement from labor makes liberatory dynamics possible. ... The concept of estrangement implies an intentionality that is determined by an estranged behaviour. Estranged from what? From all forms of labor dependent on capital. Workers do not suffer from their alienation when they can transform it into active estrangement, that is refusal.

However, the integrated power of what Berardi calls "semiocapitalism", structured by the global reach of digital communication networks, has eroded those mental and geographical boundaries which the under-pressure worker/jobseeker/student/consumer would previously have fought to maintain. The duties of alienated labour are now diffused into every corner of life. Under such conditions it is increasingly difficult to impose temporal or spatial limits on work which is as mobile and insidious as its sources and products are seemingly ungraspable. "Both simple executing workers and entrepreneurial managers share the vivid perception that they depend on a constant flow that cannot be interrupted and from which they cannot step back save at the price of being marginalized."

The initial challenge, then, for the subject programmed to circulate inside this matrix of flexible labour and corporatized education, permanent debt and commodified emotion, is to try to step back from the semiotic flow and re-claim those spaces which have been lost to the rising tide of capital; to somehow distance oneself from the ideology while immersed in it, to find ways to refuse when refusal is impossible.

Overcoming these contradictions involves thinking tactically: opposing assumptions of endless flexibility and availability with suggestions of inflexibility/unavailability, highlighting the superficiality of the obligatory performances of customer service, disengaging from the incessant language of aspiration. These are all small attempts to direct alienation outwards into a relation of estrangement, and to collectively and cumulatively build this into a weapon of mass refusal.

Meet the Real Me

Via a fellow Twitterer I recently became aware of http://www.meettherealme.co.uk/, a recruitment website which advertises in the Guardian’s online jobs section. Graduates are encouraged to post personal profiles and ‘Video CVs’ onto the site's database in the hope of attracting the attention of employers. As the blurb explains: ‘We offer jobseekers a way to stand out from the crowd ... We bring top candidates and employers together in a fresh, unique and fun environment.’ And, of course, ‘we save employers valuable time and money in the recruitment process too!’ Great!

I am about as fluent in Graduatese as I am in Klingon, but if I was able and willing to speak the language of this site and its ilk, how would I describe the ‘real me’? Would it turn out to be anything like this?

I am articulate, passionate, ambitious and a creative, original thinker who would be a genuine asset to any organisation. I am a strong and influential employee who prides themselves in being professional and creative within challenging situations. As a proactive organised multi-tasker with the ability to write, research and present material at a high level, I work equally well individually or as part of a team. I'm looking for work in an enthusiastic environment where I can show my true skills. I want to be part of a busy, pressurised, creative environment with everyone working towards the same goal. I can adapt myself to a variety of roles to develop and learn new skills to develop myself to progress in my career.

So much for standing out; as illustrated by the quotes collected above, the candidates’ statements are interchangeable, like the copy-and-paste products of a random CV jargon generator. Stock adjectives – creative, passionate, ambitious – float past, adrift from any clear object. Could someone really recognise themselves in any of those phrases? Are they meant to communicate anything to potential employers beyond a familiarity with grad-speak and a supine compliance? Do they not rather evoke some sort of generic immaterial worker defined by form over content and purged of individuality? In addition, the juxtaposition between academic achievement and career expectations can be unintentionally hilarious. One profile reads as follows: ‘My academic career has seen me achieve consistently excellent marks across a broad range of disciplines, and having completed a Masters in History, I am looking to gain experience in an area where the exceptional literary and analytical skills I have developed will be put to best use.’ And the candidate’s preferred work sector in which to deploy these exceptional literary and analytical skills? ‘Media Sales’.

But wait. The ‘realness’ of meettherealme.com is clearly supposed to be encapsulated in the Video CVs, webcammed elevator speeches uploaded by the candidates for public viewing (click the boxes next to the generic questions on the profile pages). Presumably the idea is to simulate an actual interview, without the awkwardness of proximity and edited down to a 45 second spurt of positivity. Unsurprisingly then, these video auditions resemble Apprentice-themed speed-dating exercises. They are mostly limited to people talking up their leisure interests, with work only mentioned in passing, but with keywords like ‘competitive’ nevertheless dropped in conspicuously. Travel and socialising are mentioned again and again, pre-empting the expected demands for mobility and networking. There is a kind of desperation about the clips which makes them almost unwatchable, and in this sense I suppose they do indeed point towards something real, but rather than a shining enthusiasm it is the prospect of the all-encompassing black hole of emotional labour, the excruciating spectacle of a personality harnessed and put to work. Snowboarding or playing the guitar are not so much interests as convenient props, seamlessly incorporated into the performative repertoire, augmenting the generic boardroom patter and suggesting an upbeat, accept-anything attitude.

Thankfully I have no access to video-making technology, so even if I did feel compelled to humiliate myself in this way, I'd be excluded. I would have to upgrade my kit and smarten up my act if I wanted to compete with these fresh-faced performers and unlock my potential in the 21st century professional jobseeking marketplace. Besides, I am too old and curmudgeonly to ‘put myself out there’, as I believe is the expression. But could this be a glimpse of the routine horror which awaits those students leaving the talent schools of the future, already inducted into  the education/jobseeking/networking/self-marketing ‘corporate skills’ circuit?

Scanning for new sales interns, the Project Manager scrolls through dozens of virtual presentations, ‘meets’ another hopeful. Enthusiasm, confidence, adaptability – all the buzzwords are there and the script is impeccably delivered. But there is perhaps just the faintest trace of doubt in the candidate’s voice, behind her smile a grimace which seems to be saying: Is this what I really want? Is this what I really bought with those tuition fees and I’m now starting to pay for? Is this really all I’ve learned? Is this really me?

(January 2010)

A search on the Jobcentre website showed a newly added vacancy for warehouse assistants at a well-known building materials company. I called the phone number on the site and was given an appointment for an interview the following day at an office in the city centre.

Dressed in my regulation jobseeker’s suit and holding a piece of paper on which I had scrawled the address, I walked up and down the relevant street a couple of times without success before noticing a small sticker bearing the company’s name by the intercom of an otherwise anonymous-looking building. I buzzed, a voice answered, the door clicked open.

The space on the third floor had obviously only just been moved into, no doubt evacuated by a bankrupt predecessor. Pot plants were dumped randomly on the floor and men strode in and out of rooms furnished only with chairs and wallcharts, leaving the doors wide open and booming across the corridor to each other, Clarkson-style, about football results and sales figures. I was directed to a seat in the reception area and waited there, nervously re-arranging my suit jacket and fearing accusations of impersonating an office worker.

The warehouse manager was unavailable so instead I was seen, bizarrely but predictably enough given the seemingly arbitrary set-up, by the regional sales co-ordinator. A middle-aged man, his generic trustworthy face had been cleansed of all traces of personality by decades of implementing marketing strategies and chasing corporate targets. He set me to filling in an application form (gripped by the task, I went further into it than I needed to; only my name and contact details were required, the rest could be completed later), and rubbed the ring on his finger in a distracted way while he talked in a friendly tone about flexibility and how we all have lives to lead outside work, whether it’s kids, or sailing (oh yes, me and my yacht are inseparable...). This by way of explaining the reasoning behind the 24 hour seven-day-a-week shift system.

I nodded, shaping my mouth into a series of calibrated grins, while scanning the featureless desk and noticing how he continued to stroke his wedding ring while he talked, as if it were somehow the source of his script. Yes, that’s fine, I said. I had assumed that such a rota would be due to the company wanting to squeeze every last drop of profit out of its workforce, but now I understood how such an arrangement is actually in my interests. You’re right, regular hours are so restricting aren’t they, I didn’t realise until now how liberating 24/7 availability could be.

And so the sales-talk came around to the job itself. The company was setting up a distribution base in the area, requiring a whole new industrial team. The warehouse – which was located on the other side of the city, quite near to my home, luckily enough - was brand new. In fact, they hadn’t actually finished building it yet, but they were recruiting in advance, hence the interviews here. I’d be directly employed by the company, not through an agency, he assured me, with a wink of sincerity. There would be a week covering induction, orientation, health and safety, all the usual preparatory requirements. Minimum wage to start with, of course, but prospects for more. And the products? Glass, mostly. Windows; window frames; double glazing; conservatories. Home improvement materials. You know the sort of thing. Another familial twist of the ring, a fatherly glint of the eye. Hmm, yes, I lied, thinking of our rented flat, undecorated since the Seventies. I know the sort of thing.

The salesman glanced at my superfluously filled application form. He was audibly impressed by my academic qualifications and said there was no doubt I’d be an asset to the team. As none of these qualifications were actually relevant to the job, however, I thought it judicious to mention that more importantly I had a year’s experience of warehouse work. Yes, of course, of course. “We’ll definitely be in touch.” A slippery handshake and I was back on the street, my walk-on role finished, offstage again and itching to get rid of the stifling jobseeker’s costume of suit and tie.

Then, nothing.

This was not surprising; it happened all the time, even after the interview stage, especially with vacancies advertised online or via agencies: a mouse-click or phone call that goes nowhere, an empty exchange of formalities. Such is the usual story of contemporary jobseeking; as elsewhere in life, all that is solid melts into air. But in this case the intangibility of the experience somehow challenged me to test its (un)reality. I wondered whether I’d imagined the whole episode, the unfinished office and gimcrack appointment, which had scrolled by as if someone had got halfway through designing a job interview simulation program and got bored. I suspected that attempting to gain any sort of human ‘feedback’ would be like groping a mannequin; but still, there was the distant chance that they had forgotten me, lost my details, or that only those applicants who were persistent enough to follow up the appointment would be taken on. As I hadn’t made a note of the phone number (the vacancy having since disappeared from the website), the only way of making contact again was to go back and ask in person. So after three weeks I returned to the anonymous office building and pressed the intercom. I prepared to be greeted by silence, but again a voice answered and I was buzzed in.

The place was still barely there. The same receptionist sat in the foyer, although of course she gave no indication that she remembered me (recognition had not been written into the program?). There was no sign of the sales executive, but a young man of indeterminate status who just happened to be standing nearby led me into the same generic office and explained that all the vacancies had been filled – that’s odd, I said, I applied the same day the vacancy was listed, and the interviewer sounded hopeful - and besides, the location of the warehouse had since changed(!). The only jobs left were door-to-door sales.

An image came to mind of myself approaching some suburban porch with a stack of ropey brochures, aiming to wheedle my way into some citizen’s misplaced trust: the stuff of nightmares. How desperate would I have to be to take a sales job? Debt arrears, imminent homelessness, starving child? If you ever see me loitering in a residential area with a zip folder under my arm and a freshly painted smile on my face you’ll know it’s a hostage situation. The deep sadness in my eyes will confirm it. In this case it is your duty to stab me in the throat before I speak. Death would be a merciful release.

I wondered whether this was in fact the ploy all along: draw people in with the prospect of imaginary jobs and mitigate their disappointment with the offer of commission-only sales work. It would explain the presence of the oily salesman at the interview; but why recruit from a pool of people like me, under cover of manual labour? Surely there wasn’t much of a crossover between shifting pallets and shifting units? Or perhaps it’s my perspective that I need to shift, and learn to accept that everything is now interchangeable, homogenised. A job is a job. Personal preference or ability, like the work itself, is immaterial.

I declined the young man’s offer and headed for the exit, eager to leave this purgatorial non-place with its non-jobs. How many more offices like this were dotted around the city and the country, emptied of meaning, existing in a kind of amnesic void? These are the sorts of jobs and work practices on which this country is pinning its hopes for a brighter future.

I suspect that sooner or later, due to some combination of jobcentre bullying and cliff-edge precarity, I’ll fail to escape from one of these awful ‘opportunities’. By the time you read this I might already have fallen victim to such a fate. Look out for me, shuffling zombie-like towards your front door, wearing a rictus smile and clutching a home improvement brochure...

Satisfaction Guaranteed

Lap dancers "motivated by career and economic choices, not coercion", according to study.

Apparently researchers found that "the vast majority of dancers reported high rates of job satisfaction. The main attraction of the work was the flexibility it offered to combine different work options and studying." One professional stripper said she welcomed the opportunity "to be self-employed, to not have a boss and to work as much or as little as you want." She also described her job in positive terms, as follows: "I get to choose my own music, my own clothes and perform my own show."

The headline that one in four dancers is a graduate is surely a non-story. Is anyone in the real world actually shocked by this? I was only surprised it is not three out of four. A degree just offers more material for exploitation: the virtuoso performer is required to add value by shaking her academic tassles, expected (recalling Annabel Chong's anecdote quoted in Nina Power's One-Dimensional Woman) to do her Foucault routine, while the customer gets off on convincing himself that he is engaged in an enlightened partnership (remember, the woman is supposedly 'her own boss') rather than an old-fashioned power-wank.

The myth articulated through this language of bodily and economic flexibility, that the university-educated freelance sexual labourer is somehow automatically liberated from male oppression, is illustrative of a culture of unfreedom and unquestioning positivity. Academia becomes a backroom of the hospitality industry, training up a steady supply of ultra-compliant and indebted female students ready to meet the demands of rich lecherous men. Presumably the next step will be to formalise this 'transferable skill' by including lap dancing modules on degree courses...

In the light of recent official announcements about tougher sanctions and private bounty hunters, it seems that the future role of Jobcentres and the DWP and their business partners will be primarily to deter welfare claimants rather than help them, while also provoking and absorbing hostility from their 'customers' which will then be processed and returned to them in a safely institutionalised form.

Obviously in this atmosphere people must be supported to claim the money to which they are entitled while refusing to accept the stigma that routinely comes with it (is this how the government plan to 'reduce' levels of unemployment - through a campaign of negative publicity and bureaucratic intimidation?). Rather than pointlessly petitioning the state on its own terms, however, the culture of precarious work and 'jobseeking' might be better attacked at those points where it is most flexible, and potentially most vulnerable. When workplace relations have been systematically fragmented while the conditions of unemployment have been intensified and privatised, maybe it is time to consider the possibility of a tactical withdrawal of the labour of jobseeking...?

How feasible, for instance, is the idea of locally organised and targeted actions to boycott individual recruitment agencies for short periods? Focusing on one agency at a time - arbitrarily, on behalf of all agencies, on say a monthly rotation - such action would involve asking people to withhold contact from that particular agency for purposes of registration, job searching etc. and decline any casual work it offers during that period. The aim would be to block that agency's assumed flow of short-term gap-filling candidates.

Some potential problems: in practical terms, how to make enough people aware of such a project to make a noticeable difference in any given area, especially when contact is often so remote and fleeting; and also whether people immersed in the individualistic, competitive jobseeking discourse would trust the idea of any sort of collective action. Even if they are sympathetic, if they are really desperate for money they might see even this small sacrifice as unrealistic...

As If By Magic...

By the end of the third episode of The Fairy Jobmother, its narrative formula is clear. Unemployment, the programme suggests, is not the result of social factors (the concentration of capital in a few global corporations whose interests are served by maintaining competition for low-paid labour, the haemorrhaging of the public sector, the exporting of manufacturing, the uneven distribution of working hours, precarity etc.) but rather of personal failures. The UK, we are led to believe, is in the grip of an epidemic, not of poverty or insecure work, but of morally weak welfare-dependent individuals who can't be bothered to take their places as productive citizens. Given a short sharp shock, these people can be brought out of their self-induced torpor and empowered to realise their dreams. In a language familiar from private welfare-to-work schemes, we are told that the barriers to work are not external, but inside ourselves, in the forms of “confidence” and “self-esteem”, in not projecting the right sort of appearance or accept-anything attitude. What’s more, welfare is not a safety net but a system in which people get “trapped”, and which needs to be got rid of in order for us all to be truly free.

This approach obviously chimes in with the current liquidizing of the welfare state, and the resurgent stigmatising of the unemployed under cover of rehabilitation. Unemployment is viewed at best as a lifestyle choice, at worst a mental disorder, rather than an inevitable effect of a economy which routinely leaves dozens of applicants to fight over even the most poorly paid, tenuous job.

The character of the Fairy Jobmother herself is played by Hayley Taylor, last seen on Benefit Busters chivvying a group of single mothers into unpaid work trials at Poundland in her capacity as ‘tutor’ for private welfare-to-work provider A4E. Having been given her own somewhat implausible makeover and tooled up with some half-baked psychological exercises, Taylor now gets the opportunity to bully the jobless in their own homes, showing that there is no refuge from the jobseeking discourse, and, above all, there can be no excuse for not getting a job.

The story begins by setting up the conflict which is played throughout for comic effect: each week the participants - who, let us remember, have volunteered to take part in the programme, indicating just how desperate they must be to find work - are introduced with some predictable out-of-context soundbites: “There’s no point in working”, “I’d just rather lie in bed and do nothing” etc. As if by magic, the Fairy Jobmother then arrives and installs herself inside their home, where she turns her nose up at their meagre way of life, despises them if they get up later than her, and treats them like recalcitrant children. As Taylor explains in her introductory speech, she believes it is the “security” of welfare benefits which stops people “moving forward”: “the system makes it too easy for them.” So begins this particularly spiteful variant of the usual Reality TV script of contrived confrontations and reconciliations. Unemployment becomes a topic of entertainment, and the mundane and mostly futile administrative task of finding a job is turned into a kind of spiritual quest, a journey of self-discovery which reaches its happy-ever-after ending in a warehouse or on a retail sales floor.

It should be acknowledged that there are moments when this unpleasant domestic intimacy causes the series to stumble across a distinctly unfunny truth, especially regarding money. Living on welfare is not the easy ride Taylor imagines. The tabloid emperors-on-benefits myth is found to be utterly unsubstantiated in all three cases, and the Jobmother’s comparative cash calculations are soon revealed as irrelevant, even though the rewards of low-paid work are marginal. In one episode one can almost sense her disappointment when she opens the fridge to find it empty, and not stacked with ready-meals or booze. There are no plasma screens or nights out to counterbalance the poverty, and even Taylor is chilled by the vampiric presence of the neighbourhood ‘loan man’. But these insights are not allowed to divert the programme from its pre-set route.

Undeterred, the Jobmother rolls out a hotchpotch of crude pseudo-therapeutic interventions. Just as she opens up her hosts’ cupboards, she also pokes around in their minds, exposing their fears and playing on their insecurities. With the second family it soon becomes apparent that she is out of her depth here, as lack of work is the least of their problems. At the end, while the daughter gives thanks to Currys for a job as a sales assistant, the mother is offered a long-overdue course of counselling (which she could not otherwise afford), by which we are presumably asked to view the whole process as somehow worthwhile and not gratuitously traumatic.

On another occasion Taylor takes a penniless young woman to a cafe in order to show her all the signs of consumption she is missing. She makes her compare herself to a nearby woman who has a job and tells her she could have the same material rewards if she were to “stop hiding behind ... the fact that you’re a mum” (being a mother is just an excuse for economic inactivity!). Having cynically drawn attention to her lack of money, she makes the woman cry in order to then console her, telling her: “you can be whoever you want to be.” This is a recurring strategy. In the same episode she winds up the husband, making him angry in order to then admonish him, telling him not to raise his voice, as if he was in an A4E training room, not his own kitchen. As well as generating tawdry gobbets of entertainment, such exchanges lay the foundations for the Jobmother’s disciplinary-ideological role, showing how the barriers to work are supposedly internal, not external. Anger/sadness is portrayed as an irrational symptom (“He can’t face up to a lot of things”) rather than a rational response to social circumstances.

Having completed her observations, the Jobmother diagnoses her subjects as holding themselves back and being “stuck” in the benefits system. She arranges various days of work experience, which provide lots of some cheap and cheerful visual material and give the illusion of her approach bringing swift results (but don’t the TV producers and publicity-seeking employers ultimately gain more from this ‘work experience’ than the unemployees?). Having switched from caring counsellor to harsh interrogator, she is now in full-on Pauline Campbell-Jones mode, complete with ridiculous ‘Hayley’s drive to life!’ motivational roadmap: a picture of her fairytale world, far removed from reality.

Significantly, despite Taylor’s insistence that “the jobs are out there” only one of the three programmes includes any actual ‘jobseeking’, beyond made-for-TV work experience and confidence-building makeover exercises. A redundant warehouse manager (who does not even qualify for Jobseeker’s Allowance because his wife works full-time) is subjected to a regime of intensive job searching, while his understandable ambivalence after three years of rejections is used as a stick with which to beat him. “He has to get this job himself,” the Jobmother tells us in her best matronly voice. Yet none of the jobs that inevitably materialise in the series can be traced to any real applications, but seem rather to appear out of nowhere, with a wave of the Fairy Jobmother’s wand. “She’s heard about an opening at a local kitchen design company...”, “Hayley's introducing him to a recruitment agency who think they can help...”, “She’s heard of a couple of job vacancies...” The potential jobs are introduced over montages of purposeful walkabouts, but exactly how these vacancies were discovered is not explained. 

How has she “heard of” them? Were they advertised anywhere? Were they set up in advance, or did they spontaneously spring up in the local area? Were the presence of the TV production company and the promise of positive publicity for the respective employers not factors in their discovery? Were all the other candidates for these positions also accompanied by camera crews during their interviews, in the interests of fairness? Unless there were no other candidates, in which case, why not?

The programme gives the impression that jobs are waiting to be picked like ripe fruit if only the hapless sofa-bound jobseeker would go out and look for them, and the viewer is asked to connect the earlier psychological shakedown or jobseeking frenzy with the appearance of these jobs, whereas in fact no real link is discernable between them. Such a connection, like the character of the Fairy Jobmother herself, is not real, but magical. Just as she descends from TV-land, these jobs fall from the sky like gifts from the capitalist gods, deus ex machina rescue-packages and plot resolution devices.

The participants’ motives for volunteering to taking part in the series now become apparent. The pay-off for enduring all this contrived humiliation is a chance of work and income which is desperately needed but would otherwise be unobtainable. While Taylor harangues the out-of-work husband for not trying hard enough and tells his wife he has deceived her about his efforts to find work, the couple sit together, stoically accepting this televised indignity because there will hopefully be a job at the end of it (just as, presumably, the promise of counselling was dangled in front of the depressed woman). And who can blame them? If you have a family, or your home is on the line, what wouldn’t you do to protect them? I certainly wouldn’t rule it out myself. They knew, after so many failed applications and in such a bleak environment, that this would probably be the only way to grab the attention of an employer. The rule of the makeover narrative means that, if you go along with it and play the role expected of you, it must succeed. All the resources of television and PR are poured into ensuring that it does.

Sure enough, in the preparation for interviews for these miraculous jobs the programme moves into familiar TV makeover territory. Regardless of the actual job, interview preparation becomes a kind of all-purpose theatrical rehearsal. Indeed, in today’s competitive human marketplace job interviews are routinely framed as talent show auditions, in which one plays a synthetically smoothed out and superficially enthusiastic version of oneself and fields generic, meaningless questions as if from a script. Of course the programme embraces this idea of style over substance and takes it to ludicrous lengths. So the jobseekers undergo coaching in speech and body language (“Never say ‘Hiya”’, “the walk is your biggest issue”), expensive hairdos and even cosmetic dental work to suppress their real identities and make sure they make the right televisually enhanced impression for that once-in-a-lifetime job opportunity.

After edited highlights of the interview itself, its back home for the predictable finale: the obligatory nervous finger-tapping waiting scenes anticipate the call from the employer and the job offer, which is greeted with squeals of delight and tears of relief, as if the candidate had won The X Factor. Hugged by her grateful subjects, the Jobmother then disappears back to her magical realm, where the minimum wage is a living wage, all jobs are life-enhancing, no-one needs welfare because everyone just makes the effort, and a dozen people fit into every vacancy.

Beneath its garish docu-comedy characterisations, The Fairy Jobmother conveys an aspirational message which is as serious as it is unrealistic and damaging: that under our current economic conditions anyone can become whoever they want to be, and all limitations are self-inflicted. The stereotype of the self-sabotaging welfare junky is reinforced, using those very people who are most desperate for work. The more these individuals are superficially transformed, the more society is allowed to stay the same.

I have an email interview with Billie Ray Martin in the new Spring 2010 issue of Flux magazine.