Last night I watched “The Girl in the Cafe” on the BBC, a drama about poverty which combined a typical Richard Curtis (screenwriter of the films Four Weddings, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary and Love Actually) love story with the efforts of Britain’s chancellor and prime minister to persuade the other G8 nations to agree to eliminate poverty. It was cleverly done, getting the message across about how desperate poverty is and how relatively simple it is for the western world to reduce it with new agreements on trade, aid and debt. It was also very trite, relying on a fantasy storyline of a young woman, an outsider invited to the G8 summit, telling the world leaders why they should stop poverty.
But then isn’t Sir Bob Geldof doing just that? Telling us to tell world leaders why they should make poverty history? So perhaps the storyline wasn’t so far-fetched after all, although it felt like it watching it. I have a huge amount of respect for Bob Geldof; I’m sure he bugs a lot of people, particularly the politicians he is seeking to influence, but he has stood up and been counted and the work he has undertaken and the results he has achieved have improved the lives of millions of poor people. He has also had a career as a musician and brought up four children, mostly on his own. I don’t imagine that on his deathbed he will be questioning what he has managed to achieve with his life.
