I’ve got to confess that I’m a bit behind the times. The Secret Millionaire series was first shown at the beginning of the year but I have only just caught it in repeats on More4.
But I’ve found it so compelling that I have to talk about it. The series is produced by RDF media, the company who brought us Wife Swap, a programme which specialises in putting people into an alien situation in an alien culture and getting them riled up in the pressure cooker environment of an often quite bizarre family. Great TV, but not very subtle. Mercifully, The Secret Millionaire is free from the emotional firestorms that are born from big characters having to justify their lifestyles to people they don’t like. Instead, it is about people making quite a big effort to help others at quite a cost to themselves.
Needy causes
You can guess the premise of the show from its title. A millionaire goes to an impoverished community where they spend ten days looking for ways to make their money work for other people. They disguise themselves as a ‘person with camera crew making a documentary about people moving into the area’ and look for ways to get involved with the local people. The success of this mainly depends on the ingenuity of the millionaire who has simultaneously got to come to terms with living on unemployment benefit and trying to socialise sufficiently to identify needy causes. The best results seemed to be where the philanthropists identify individuals who are entrepreneurs in some way, employing and training local people who wouldn’t otherwise get a chance.
