Sweat Sweat Sweat

If you look hard enough you can find plenty of moral instruction in rock and roll. And I'm not talking about Cliff Richard, daddy-o. Actually, I'm urging you to listen again to The Sex Pistols and their fourth single 'Holidays In The Sun'. It's a song that was inspired by the band's visit to Berlin and the creepy realisation that some day, tourists would be flocking to concentration camps to witness a bit of history.

That idea is commonplace now, and the holiday industry has a unique term for it. They call it "dark tourism" and while they don't talk about it much in public, Belfast is quietly gearing up for a bit of that. So there's an intention to keep some of our nasty old murals intact, and to preserve a range of the appalling artefacts from The Troubles. Pretty soon, you'll be able to buy the Ulster Conflict bumper sticker and the matching T shirt.

The Sex Pistols went further when Johnny Rotten wailed about "a cheap holiday in other people's misery". He was talking about the responsibility that comes from having a better economy than some other earth dweller. Historically, it's a licence to plunder and exploit, and I was thinking again of these lyrics when I watched the latest episode of the BBC3 series, Blood Sweat And T Shirts.

The show takes six young fashion muppets from England and delivers them into the Indian garment industry. Each layer gets them closer to pure deprivation, from manufacture to cotton preparation. Some of the visitors are merely horrified, but ad executive Richard originally claimed that the Indians just weren't trying hard enough to better themselves. That was last week, and now the chastened fellow seems to have accepted that poverty is often an accident of birth.

This week, the Brits visitors staggered under mountains of cotton, and gawped at a sweat shop in a slum district that might have been designed by Satan himself. This was an odd kind of entertainment. It was instructive in a way that many BBC3 programmes are not. It wasn't a cheap holiday.