I was a keen follower of Close Up on TV One and enjoyed Mark Sainsbury’s searching current affairs interviews, but am less enamoured with the Seven Sharp replacement. The super-confident trio of presenters sit at the one desk and have curious conversations with each other, laughing at their own repartee which I don’t find particularly entertaining. It is probably aimed at a different demographic grouping and so I’ve had to move on.
My first port of call was Campbell Live. Initially Campbell seemed to concentrate on the on-going dramas of people’s lives in Christchurch after the earthquake, which was interesting enough, but he lost my goodwill a few weeks ago when he announced on a Monday night that he was going to spend the week travelling the length and breadth of the country asking the rank and file what they thought of the GCSB amendment bill.
I went searching for another seven o’clock slot for my nightly entertainment and in so doing missed the Prime Minister’s trouncing of John Campbell on the Wednesday night after I’d abandoned him on the Monday.
Never mind, on a channel called the Box, which I’ve scarcely given a cursory glance to in the past, I found my replacement for Campbell Live and Seven Sharp with an erotic sounding programme called Hardcore Pawn.
And now I’m hooked.
Hardcore Pawn is a nightly reality show chronicling the dubious daily goings-on in a Detroit pawn shop called American Jewelry and Loan. The store itself would probably dwarf our local Warehouse and has a matching carpark and fifty staff to serve the city’s less fortunate citizens who join a queue looking for what I suspect are cripplingly high-interest-rate loans, or approach the counters to sell or pawn their precious belongings.
The company owner is Les Gold whose face is as hard as his bargaining skills and he is assisted by son Seth and daughter Ashley. They are constantly surrounded by large muscle-bound men who act as security guards for the family and the business.
Their protection services are certainly well-utilised.
Seth and Ashley are both university graduates and are probably smarter than their father, but not as ruthless and I fear the business may not survive dare he seek to retire. The family constantly bicker and there is some serious sibling rivalry.
This is compelling television; I imagine it will have a cult following in the US, but it is a sad indictment on American society.
Detroit is of course a city in despair. The Japanese and the Koreans have taken the lion’s share of the world’s car manufacturing industry and the city recently filed for bankruptcy. Those who could afford to will have fled the environs and American Jewelry and Loan will be the last stop for those who are left behind jobless and seemingly penniless.
Gold, his children and his senior staff assess the value of the goods that are brought in and inevitably offer an amount that is usually a fraction of what might reasonably be expected. You just know the desperate customer is going to take the pitifully low offer because it is clear their circumstances are so dire any amount of money is welcome.
The opening credits to the programme suggest that parental guidance is advised and that course language may offend. Mercifully the good people at Box, aware of our inbuilt sensitivities, have over-ridden the cuss words and the whole programme is punctuated with beeps.
A large percentage of American Jewelry and Loan customers are African-Americans and they seem to have a language all of their own. English yes, but with a dialect that means the producers often have to put in place sub-titles so the rest of us can understand just what is being said.
Sub-titles, with lots of beeps.
If the language is appalling then the behaviour of some is even more so. If this is reality then America needs to take stock. Last week the last item on TV One news featured a few lines of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech delivered before a crowd of 250,000 from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington after a civil rights rally in 1963. Switching then to Hardcore Pawn I got the overwhelming impression that fifty years on, the march was in vain and for many the dream has become a nightmare.
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