On my way to work early one morning, walking through St Peter’s Square in Manchester, I happened upon a couple of dozen blokes in hi-vis workwear standing in a big circle. At the centre stood a woman, presumably a physiotherapist of some kind, taking them through a series of warmup exercises. Arms windmilled, necks rotated, knees were hugged to chests. I filed this away as a very sweet sight and a fine but possibly rare example of a company doing the right thing by its manual workforce.
Then, this week, I was filming something for the BBC’s Countryfile programme in west Cornwall. Driving to somewhere spectacular, I asked the runner, a young man who we’ll call Tam from Taunton, what other shows he had worked on in his career. I got one of the more interesting answers I’ve had to that question: he had spent three years working as a roofer. Like, I suspect, many of the thousands of media students who graduate every year, he was unable to find a job in television. He said he had done quite well at roofing, and enjoyed it. So why, I asked, did he stop?
