After last week’s show on relationships, the second part of Jon Richardson’s trilogy discovering how to be a happy adult looks into the subject of money. Does wealth make you happy? he asks. It’s a well-worn question but the episode is a corker, mainly because Richardson has clearly given the matter a lot of thought: “I would rather save a pound than earn a tenner,” he muses in one of his Seinfeldian comic interludes.
It also helps that some of the people Richardson and his wingman Matt Forde meet on their camper van travels are extremely interesting. There’s the inevitable lottery winner, of course, who even has a tiled lotttery logo on the floor of the pool in his well-appointed country residence. Forde, in the idiot savant Karl Pilkington role, provides light relief by seeming to be more interested in his aftershave than his millions.
Elsewhere there are various contrasts at play. There’s the homeless man who earns a living but doesn’t want to live in a house, the squatters outside Heathrow Airport who are very content and there is a timely interview with the family of the man who made his millions founding Phones4u and sold the firm long before their recent problems. His children are not exactly miserable, but Richardson finds that they do seem unmotivated compared to their dad and he struggles to sympathise with them. Unearnt money is clearly not always as much fun as earnt money.
It would have been good if Richardson had maybe encountered some old money too, a well-heeled aristo in a real fuck-off stately home perhaps. There is not much about class here. Instead the documentary concludes with a compelling encounter with Brian, who made it big then sold his country estate for £16 million to move into a modest flat and set up a charity ferrying cancer patients to hospital. Richardson is clearly moved by Brian’s humility and, presumably, by the fact that when Brian revisits his old house – now a country hotel and spa – he doesn’t seem to miss the luxury for a moment.
While there is plenty of humour here it mainly comes out in the banter between Richardson and Forde. The interviews are played pretty straight. The subject might not be the most groundbreaking, but we do get an insight into Richardson’s background when we meet his mum and we find out how hard times were when he was growing up and she slept on the sofa so that Jon and his sister could have beds. It was probably that struggle that gave Richardson the hunger to be so successful and thus financially secure. The conclusion, though never stated, is pretty clear. Never mind a happy life, if you want to be a successful stand-up it helps if you don't have loaded parents.
Jon Richardson Grows Up concludes on C4 next Monday at 10pm. This episode is on 4od.
