How do you animate a concept like poverty for viewers? Well, it turns out you literally … animate it. The latest event in the Why Poverty? BBC project – which comprises eight documentaries, screened across 180 countries, attempting to answer the question of why there are, in 2012, a billion people around the world still living in desperate penury – was Poor Us – An Animated History of Poverty (BBC4). It took us, via a cartoon figure framed as a dream by affluent westerners falling asleep in front of their plasma screen televisions or in their comfortable beds, across time and space to outline a history of poverty from Neolithic to modern times. It was wonderful.
The animated figure swooped and flew and mutated from hunter-gatherer to early farmer to Inca ruler to African native to 18th-century Chinese peasant to ceaseless labourer in the dark satanic mills thrown up by the industrial revolution, to starving victim of Mao's Great Leap Forward, to recipient of western aid (and repayer of western loans) to member of the increasingly poor and frustrated underclass in the European city of your choice.
The silhouetted figure's travels were interspersed with appearances by assorted impossibly well-informed and articulate experts on poverty such as Nobel laureate and professor of economics at Columbia University Joseph Stiglitz. They supplied stark facts, limned social and economic theories and practices and filled in the backstory for each animated scene with small, sinewy explanations of the damage colonialism and slavery have wrought, and continue down the generations to wreak, on the economy of a nation as well as on the bodies and souls of individuals.
It's not a story that Europeans come out of well. The Spanish and Portuguese grab Latin American land, forcing the displaced populations to work themselves to death on the new plantations. The Victorians build railways in India and use them to export grain while the workers starve. Thriving African economies are destroyed when their cowrie-shell currencies are outlawed and rendered worthless at the stroke of a conqueror's pen. Gone are the days of hunter-gatherer equality (you could, after all, only be so much better than the next man at picking berries and grubbing up grub). Divisions between rich and poor appear first within and then between countries, until we arrive today at our first, second and third world split.
Despite the history it had to relate, the programme acknowledged that progress has been made. The move has been, overall, from more to less poverty. In 1800, 80% of the world's population was poor. Now estimates say it is between 15 and 20%. That is a good thing. The fact that today the poorer 50% of the global population earn less than 3% of global household income is not. And the fact that a re-organisation of the systems that have induced and entrenched such poverty, and a redistribution of wealth so that if 3% was raised to just 5%, would eradicate extreme poverty entirely, is good and bad and astonishing whatever way you look at it.
Poor Us was a miracle of clarity and compression. It wore its learning lightly and deployed it well, informing the ignorant (among which I count myself) without – I imagine – insulting the intelligence of those better acquainted with the subject. If I may speak for my fellow ignoramuses, it was as if someone was reaching into your brain in every scene and briskly dusting off broken fragments of books and articles read, uniting disparate thoughts, supplementing others, planting new ones and oiling the rusting machinery at your cerebral centre that would allow you, once the new, knowledge-salve had worked its way thoroughly round, to cogitate further at your leisure. This is not a feeling you get often from television. You were richer for watching it.
Normal service was resumed, however, by Goodnight Britain (BBC1) – the first of a two-part look at "the sleep problems plaguing Britain's worst sleepers". To say that most of them could probably be solved by showing the sufferers this programme would be both a cheap gag and a genuine recommendation. It was as sinfully boring and as soporific as you might – especially, say, if you were a commissioning editor paid to think these things through –suspect an hour of watching people sleep, however badly, might be.
The desperate need to inject interest was palpable. Presenter Sian Williams and sleep investigators Dr Kirstie Henderson and Dr Jason Ellis kept pausing in the middle of sentences to try and create dramatic tension. "Normally people have to come and see us," Dr Ellis, pseudo-eagerly explained as the "mobile sleep lab" – a van fitted with cameras allowing the doctors to watch their patients as they slept – hove into view. "But with this…we can go and see them!" If there were a way of printing a half exclamation mark, I would do it. It was all he could muster, and we still had 55 minutes to go.
Unless programmes investigating common sociomedical complaints are now actually functioning as a provisional wing of the NHS, could somebody, somewhere please strike the board – or the faces of appropriate commissioning editors – and cry: "No more!"