This week’s episode was nowhere near the warm fuzzy episode from last week. In that first show, I really felt that the Gumbo family were entirely worthy of the help from another family and they were all people with a great deal of pride and dignity. However, this week, possibly because I took a pretty much instant dislike to the mother of the recipient family, Michaela O’Dwyer, I just felt sorry for her kids and her partner Shaun. But I didn’t feel that the parents were particularly in need of anything – though the children were – other than lessons in how to budget.

Clearly they were living in poverty, but I don’t get how or why they were when they had an income of around £400 a week? I brought up three children on a lot less than that. However, the Mullins family – who were sponsoring the O’Dwyers – watched the DVD that primarily featured one of the O’Dwyer children, Brandon, who is a lovely boy. Read more & comment »

Made by the team behind Secret Millionaire, this new three-part series aims – in part – to show, “just what it means to grow up in poverty in 21st century Britain.” It also shows what it’s like to live on the opposite side of that coin and be financially in a position to help others who’re less fortunate.

And I have to say, based on the glimpses we’d had of the show in ads for it, I’d made several assumptions that – happily – turned out to be completely wrong.

Christine and Ken Brotherston – parents to Grace aged 9 and Charlie aged 13 – decided that they would like to sponsor a family in this country, and to that end, they chose the Gumpo family. To be honest, I think I’d expected the Brotherston family to be kind but perhaps a little smug with it, or at least, somewhat supercilious, but as I found out in the course of the show, they were far from either of those things… Read more & comment »