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From Freefall to Benefits Street: how did TV respond to the financial crash?

After the 2008 collapse crippled the world economy, bankers briefly got the blame before British TV quickly moved on to find new targets as ‘credit-crunch commissioning’ took hold

It’s a cliché that British people recoil with awkwardness at the idea of publicly discussing money. Property shows have allowed us to privately indulge the British obsession with house price from our sofas, with money primarily existing on television as a financial prize. When the financial crisis hit in 2008 and the economy began dominating the headlines, UK TV was forced to engage in the most un-British of conversations: how would it reflect the biggest financial crisis since the great depression?

It began with big, chewy dramatisations. The Last Days of Lehman Brothers premiered on BBC Two in September 2009, a year after the crisis started. Packed with apocalyptic imagery, it offered a dramatic account of the weekend the financial crash began. Instead of following the widely propagated narrative that the crisis was a collective failure that we all bore responsibility for, the crash was depicted as an avoidable mess created by elites.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2OhPi9q
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