ABSTRACT
THE HEARTRENDING, TEAR-INDUCING stories told by incredibly worthy individuals at the beginning of every episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition certainly provides interesting TV fodder, not to mention an honourable imperative for spending heaps of money building spanking new homes equipped with expensive furniture and cool gadgetry, but they pale into insignificance when compared to the city of Liverpool’s sorry tale. Surely, if ever a makeover show were made for forlorn, down-on-their-luck cities teeming with urban ragamuffins, Liverpool would – until recently at least – have been a prime candidate to receive the full makeover treatment. Undoubtedly, viewers would have been affected by the maudlin narrative, the mawkish mythology that casts it as a blot on the landscape, a national cultural joke, Cinderella at the national city ball (Belchem 2006; Grunenberg and Knifton 2007). Thoroughly woe betided, Liverpool is frequently characterized as ‘one of Britain’s most blighted cities’ (Kivell 1993: 164), a dystopia mired in ‘decay and dereliction, high levels of unemployment, poor housing conditions’ (Savage and Warde 1996: 267), and as ‘a scarred, de-industrialized landscape’ (Childs and Storry 1999: 283). From the comical ‘calm down caricature’ to the cheerless hardscrabble image of ‘shell suited scallies’, Scousers have been derogatorily labelled and stereotyped like no other city-dwellers in England (Boland 2008). Such has been Liverpool’s downtrodden stature, its reversal of fortune in the wake of industrial decline, the yawning gap between it and the rest of England, that, despite once being the second city of the English empire (Haggerty and White 2008), it is now, somewhat speciously perhaps, cast as a postcolonial city on a par with those in the Third World (Munck 2003).
