Darrenashea’s Blog

The Secret Millionaire: undedited dialogue that i just felt i needed to get out 29/03/2010

NOTE: I have not read this. This is just an emotional outpouring from watching The Secret Millionairre.

The Secret Millionaire was a difficult watch for me. The emotional levels as you witness the hardships of individuals were there, but it was not that that tore me up.

I was born in Redcar. Just half a mile from the furnaces that formed the backdrop of the programme but they were never really my world. They were there. Always. My Dad worked at ICI, another succession of towers, smoke and fire that formed the trunk road that stretched for miles between sea and skyline. Dorman Long and its rectangular monolith overlooked the secondary school I attended. And the nights belonged to the red sky and black clouds that tore from the towers wherever you were in the area, from the ships bringing oil across the North Sea to the top of Eston Nab – turn around and you can so quickly blank it as your eyes search out the Moors and the still and the green beyond.

This was not my world although I worked myself in ICI for a summer cleaning. I remember straight roads, its own city, its own smells and its own sounds. I remember the laughs of the people who worked there, whose fathers worked there, and there fathers before them. But this was not my world.

My world was always out there. I always knew I would never stay there. I loved being there but I knew I had to go. Wanted to go.

So to watch The Secret Millionaire was torture as I felt like I was fighting my own stereotypes, my own truths, my own attitude.

I know people who live on benefits. People who live for benefits. People who know the system and how to play it. People who have never worked, and don’t intend to. Who find an excuse in the politicians, in the system, in people from outside, yet never in themselves. These are the people I thought of as the majority. These are the minority and I now know I was wrong.

I don’t want to say I have been fortunate. I don’t want to say I have worked hard to live a comfortable life and to have travelled many places in the world. What I have done, and what tortured me about the programme, was the willingness to stay. I have only been able to do the things I have done as I allowed the world in. That I saw that there was more, and I have just let it take me.

But then I go home. And home is what the north east still is to me. I drive up the A1 and I see the cooling towers near Doncaster and I know I have broken the back of the journey. And then she appears. Roseberry Topping. A beautiful maiden lying and awaiting my return. Her crooked breast jutting skywards to say, in a slightly slinky way, welcome home.

I look right only. On the right are all the secrets that The Secret Millionaire never uncovered. The secrets that the media won’t show. On the right is the green, is the air, the small villages, the winding roads, the streams, the heather and the cow grates. On the right is the quiet, the escape, the moments that prepare you for looking left as that is where the skyline sucks you back in as you topple over Ormesby Bank and the pit of my stomach turns. It does not frighten me but now, as a father, who was fortunate to have a father who didn’t push but whose manner just said, go, do something, I long for my son to travel even further.

Whether I look left or right, people stay the same. I went to a school reunion three weeks ago. Twenty three years since I had seen all of the people. An evening where I spent more time speaking to them than I did in 5, 10, 15 years of school. There was no pretence. There was no bragging. There was no fear. There were people, adults, strong, intelligent, fun loving people that made me realise, as did The Secret Millionaire, that a region is not created by the landscape, but by the hearts of the people within it.

That is my north. That is my south. That is my west. That is my east. That is what I have at my centre.