We don't want celebs preaching to poor

WHAT did people do years ago without celebrities to look in on them to see how they were coping?

Nobody from a girlband had to advise a hard-pressed single mum how to survive on benefits.

Nobody from a clothes make-over show had to empty an old woman's commode.

Not even an international rugby star in sight to give some teenage toe-rag a bit of a talking to.

I just don't know how folk managed. How did the poor get by all those years ago, living in a damp Gorbals tenement with an outside lavvy and no bit-part TV actor to tell them to keep their chin up?

Yet amazingly, down the generations, these dirt poor families got motivated enough to build battleships, qualify as doctors and lawyers and become success stories across the world.

Those British working classes produced inventors, politicians who changed the world and gifted architects like our Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

Yet now, if we're to believe the tripe served up on ITV's Seven Days On The Breadline, the great unwashed can't even function without the support of a celebrity.

I don't know who I want to slap first . . .

The producers of the programme who think it's acceptable to exploit people living on the margins and serve it up as entertainment?

The celebrities who will do just about anything these days for a bit of exposure - even if it does mean rubbing shoulders with the kind of people they'd normally cross the road to avoid?

Or the people who allowed themselves to be exploited and stripped of their dignity in front of millions of TV viewers? Because that is what shows like this do.

You can forget the crap dished up by the producers that this is television with a social conscience, a window into life on the wrong side of the tracks.

Sure, it could have been. If it was a proper programme where an experienced journalist exposed the difficulties of life at the raw end of broken Britain in a no-holds barred documentary, then it would at least have been valid.

But what puts me into a rage is that Seven Days On The Breadline does nothing more than pander to the lowest common denominator in our celebrity-obsessed society, where nothing is validated unless a celebrity puts their name to it.

Celebs are fine for Strictly Come Dancing, but this is just insulting.

A famine in Africa will barely strike a chord nowadays unless some rock star or model has a starving baby in their arms.

We've even had a bunch of wannabes from The X Factor tearfully touring a kids' cancer ward in Great Ormond Street Hospital - and they're not even celebrities yet!

The people who make these shows would try to tell us that if it wasn't for stars like Spice Girl Mel B, nobody would give a stuff about the family living in Leeds or any other sink estate.

And that without Trinny Woodall working as a carer, we wouldn't give a damn about the plight of the housebound. (By the way she emptied the disabled woman's commode into the sink! Remind me not to go for dinner at her house!)

And yes, they have a point. But what an indictment on our society that we will only sit up and take notice if a celebrity takes us by the hand.

We should be ashamed if we allow ourselves to be manipulated in this way, by people who are driven not by exposing the unfairness of it all, but by stoking viewing figures with as much tat as we are prepared to absorb.

I refuse to be a part of that.

And if we all did, they'd perhaps make programmes that would make us think for ourselves and not sit in front of the telly being spoon-fed all sorts of drivel.

It's time people dragged their a***s off the sofa and switched this nonsense off.

Let's find the backbone that made ordinary working people the beating heart of our society.

And, leave the celebs to get back to The Ivy to chat over a posh dinner about their stint in the trenches with the lower orders.

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