I went on holiday a few years ago to Las Vegas. It was absolutely incredible, I saw loads of awesome hotels; soaked up an amazing atmosphere and generally had a kick-ass time. But I feel I missed something, I don’t feel like I covered it all. So I really, more than anything want to go back.
That’s not exactly how I felt about going back to Wales today. But nevertheless, it turned out to be one the best days of my time at Sky so far.
So it was back to Merthyr Tydfil today. Although I feel like I’ve spent long enough there that I can shorten it to just Merthyr like the locals do. Me and Tim arrived In Merthyr at about 11 o’clock this morning. We drove around town for a bit, looked for a viaduct but couldn’t find it (I know, how hard can it be the find a dirty great big viaduct) and then headed back into town. In order to understand how bad the job situation is in Merthyr, I was tasked with a bit of undercover reporting. I had to pretend I was looking for a job (not too tricky seeing as I am chronically unemployed) in a series of shops. It’s annoying because I found a few nice little jobs in Nando’s or O2 that were going that I would have loved to do over the summer. Just a shame that it’s a bit of a commute to South Wales from Southend every day.
So after discovering that there are in fact a number of jobs available (in about half hours worth of research I discovered about 30 vacancies) and that the local population is just too lazy to do anything, we headed off to the Engine House Youth Club. The inclusion of ‘youth club’ in the title didn’t exactly inspire confidence, but this wasn’t any old youth club. It employed some of the local scallywags who are about my age to help out and do various chores around the town (think community service without the crime before it); and it has around 1,300 members. It’s an incredible building too, an old engine house in the steelworks converted into an indoor football pitch with a series of multi storey rooms full of computers, Xboxes, Playstations, books, drumkits, guitars, karaoke machines, pool tables etc. Basically, the sort of place you’d wish was available when you were a kid. It’s just incredible, and the guys who were employed there had some really amazing stories to tell. Stories of drug addiction, getting drunk at 10am, living off £50 a week. And to think they were only my age too (19). It’s astonishing to think these guys, who were all genuinely hard-working lads have been through more already in their lives than I could ever dream of.
So we left the youth centre and headed back into town. We stopped off and had gourmet lunch Merthyr-style (a Chicken Legend from McDonalds) and then went to Merthyr library for the second time that week. There, we tracked down a woman who had appeared in an old British Pathé news clip from 1946 that had appeared at our news desk back in Osterley. We believed she was still living in Merthyr, but turns out she’s actually in Potters Bar (isn’t the internet wonderful?). We then hopped back into the car, visited the eyesore that is the old dilapidated Hoover factory and then drove back towards the youth centre.
There, we picked up one of the guys who worked there who’d agreed to take us to the Gurnos estate to introduce us to one of the more scuzzy families. I’d been driven round the Gurnos estate on Tuesday, and whilst I’d described it as ‘Peckham after a nuclear war’, it turns out the bit we’d previously driven around was the outskirts. Our guide directed us into the heart of Gurnos, and it’s only what I can describe as ‘the rough parts of Mogadishu’. If you can imagine a scene from Black Hawk Down, where a thousand eyes are suddenly on you as the fairly unimposing Volvo estate your sitting in the front of trundles along slowly. We passed a couple struggling to walk because they were so smacked up on drugs; a man with a Doberman giving us a stare as if to say ‘keep going sonny or I’m letting go of this lead’ and some kids who could have been no more than 9 or 10 threatening to slash our tyres. Needless to say it was one of the roughest areas I’ve ever been to in my life. Our tour was cut short when we passed an ambulance and a big crowd. Turns out it was our guide’s girlfriend’s brother, who’d drunk himself to the point of near death. This was at about 10 to Six in the evening. Needless to say without the protection of a local, we swiftly headed back to England.
On the way home, me and Tim bashed out ideas of what to do with the documentary. We now had so many elements and a reasonable idea, but no coherent structure. As the documentary came together in the front of a Volvo V50 on the M4, I had the biggest grin on my face. I don’t know why. Whether it was because so many of my random ideas had made it into the structure, or whether it was because something I’d seen grow from just a few contacts was now materialising into a fully-fledged half an hour of telly right in front of me. I’m slightly sad I’m not going to see this through to the end, because I’d love to go back to Gurnos and see some more scumbags. As it is, I’m going to have to let go and wait for it to be shown on telly. Who’d have thought I’d be so attached to something about such a shit place in such a small amount of time?
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