Mud larks

ONE programme down and already one of the young Brits in Blood, Sweat and Takeaways has packed his bags and gone home, after finding skinning and boning tuna in a factory in Indonesia too much for him.

A stint on a prawn farm proves just as testing for the five remaining teenagers in this sequel to Blood, Sweat and TShirts, in which half-a-dozen spoiled young people experienced first-hand the hard work and often-appalling conditions in the sweatshops where many of their high street clothes are made.

As a nation, we’re eating more prawns than ever before. We might think twice after seeing how they get to us in restaurants, shops and cafes.

Hygiene, I should point out, is strictly enforced by the Indonesian producers, which means the prawns are fine and dandy. The five young workers are less happy with their living and working conditions.

A shack in the jungle with no running water in temperatures of 40 degrees Centigrade and high humidity make for an uncomfortable life.

You should see the look of alarm when they’re shown the prawn ponds and learn that they can flood and let crocodiles in among the prawn harvesters.

Their first task is to build mud walls to stop the prawns being washed away.

There are 1,000 metres of mud wall that must be constantly rebuilt. After a few hours they’ve managed just a few metres.

Thank goodness reinforcements arrive in the fit and eager form of farmer’s son James. He doesn’t mind getting his hands – and the rest of him – dirty squelching about in the mud. How unlike Josh who’s snivelling about missing his family.

The boss, alarmed at the slow progress, calls in Indonesian workers to complete the wall.

Going indoors, in the factory where the prawns are peeled and packed for shipping to UK outlets among others, isn’t much better. This is hard, boring work for which modern young people are illequipped physically or mentally. Workers stand all day and are expected to peel over 1,000 prawns an hour – that’s 8,000 a shift.

All for 35p an hour, the basic living wage in Indonesia.

Fast food junkie Manos is useless. He’s slow and many of the prawns he manages to peel are broken and therefore below the quality required. The supervisor ties a yellow tape round his arm – a sign that he’s a bad worker – and sends him to peel at a separate table, commenting about the failure of Manos to “show the good spirit to learn”.

At least Josh learns his lesson. “It makes you appreciate what you’ve got,”

he says. But will it stop him eating prawn sandwiches, I wanted to ask?

For all the sadistic pleasure to be had watching these young people suffer when deprived of luxuries and made to work hard, the series serves to highlight the conditions from which some of our food gets to us. If people continue to think and question after the programme is over, some good might have been done.

THE story behind what could be one of the most important scientific discoveries of the 21st Century is told in Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor: The Link.

David Attenborough lends his authority by narrating the 60-minute documentary about a fossil, known as Ida, that could be an indication of one of the roots of anthropoid evolution – the point at which our primate ancestors began first developing the features that would evolve into our own.

Of course, you might learn more about the human species by watching Britain’s Got Talent, which is monopolising ITV1’s schedules all this week.

Where else could you see gathered in one place a man who dangles heavy objects from his ears, a ten-year-old singer who cries when she loses, high-energy dance groups, and two grown men with six packs who jig away wearing masks of famous people.