TV Review - The Duchess on the Estate
Sarah Ferguson Puts Herself in the Firing Line Again
Up goes Sarah Ferguson’s head over the parapet again. For some, she will always be the toe-sucking Fergie, who married into royalty then threw it all away, but trading heavily on her connections to earn a living post-Andrew. Will her campaign to improve conditions on a Manchester housing estate win her any new fans?
At first glance the Northern Moor estate in Wythenshawe appears to fit the bill of a typical inner-city area. One of the largest council estates in Europe, one in five young men are unemployed, and residents interviewed paint a depressing picture of gangs, drug use and a prevailing attitude of “mind your own business and keep your doors locked”.
At Least She's Willing To Do Something
Ferguson certainly nails her colours to the mast early on in the programme. Pre-empting yet another bout of “Now what’s she on the box for?” she insists, “You can’t possibly help people if you don’t know what it’s like. You’ve got to know the area and you’ve got to feel it and you’ve got to live the life to really then want to champion it.”
Following a meeting with single mum Dawn McGeown and chatting to members of the local working men’s club, the duchess finally realizes the scale of the problems she faces. The lack of jobs plus the familiar “there’s nothing to do here, I’m bored” means groups of young people hanging around the streets day and night. And the ever-decreasing number of local stores means using either public transport or a car for shopping. In short, the area seems to have little to offer any member of the community.
Fix “Broken Britain” And Give Residents Some Hope
So, treading the rather familiar path of Jamie’s Ministry of Food, Ferguson decides it’s up to the residents to work together and re-establish a strong community spirit. Just as Jamie Oliver pinned his hopes on opening a drop-in centre where locals could come in for cooking lessons and share recipes, the duchess envisages a similar place offering activities for both young and old alike.
Don’t You Know Who I Am?
Admirable though the project is (and it’s hard to see any amount of funds being raised without a big name behind it), Ferguson is no Jamie Oliver when it comes to mixing with the locals. Her conversations with residents come across as stilted and rather staged; her attempt to explain who she to a nine-year-old boy who clearly has no idea is positively cringeworthy (“You know the Queen of England, the one with the crown on her head and all that? I married her son, I married a real life prince”).
And must every worthy task have a mountain of obstacles to overcome before it can possibly succeed? From the doom-laden “still to come” voiceover which prefaces every commercial break to the vandalising of the building earmarked as the new community centre at the end of part one, The Duchess on the Estate appears determined to present every minor hiccup as a guaranteed signal of failure. But in a happy-ever-after show such as this surely the gutsy Duchess of York cannot be beaten?
Perhaps if Ferguson had worked behind the scenes on the project, instead of playing Lady Bountiful in front of the ITV cameras, she would not have attracted the all-too-familiar “who does she think she is to tell us how to live our lives?” backlash. But it seems her love of the limelight has made her an easy target once again.
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