Who knew I’d be so gripped by a lying ‘wellness influencer’?
Bad Influencer:
The Great Insta Con
BBC One
★★★★☆
Kathy Burke: Money Talks Channel 4
★★★☆☆
The unexpected highlight of the week was Bad Influencer: The Great Insta Con. A good documentary, it is said, gets you interested in a subject you didn’t know you could be interested in, and that is exactly what happened here. I didn’t know I had any interest in the ‘wellness’ industry or Instagram or influencers. There was even a time when I thought an influencer was some kind of Batman villain. This week, Batman takes on The Joker, The Riddler and The Influencer. Which isn’t to say influencers can’t be villainous. And here’s the proof.
This is the story of Belle Gibson, the young Australian woman who said she had cured herself of ‘inoperable’ brain cancer by ‘clean eating’ (and other woo-woo) rather than with any of the usual medical treatments, which she had refused (this is ‘wellness’ as cure). She had tapped into something big, and quickly became a ‘super-influencer’ as well as one of the most well-known ‘wellness’ personalities in the world. She had hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers and an app (launched in 2013) that was backed by Apple, and then she secured a lucrative book deal with Penguin. All well and good – except for one thing, but it’s only small, tiny: she had never had cancer.
This is told conventionally but grippingly. There are clips of Belle. Glowing Belle, shiny Belle, with her perfect complexion and swishy ponytail. People didn’t like to say ‘You don’t look like you have cancer’, so they didn’t (it wasn’t just the original brain tumour; she later said she had multiple pathologies that she was keeping in remission). And there are the former devotees, including two young British women, Maxine and Pixie. They had idolised Belle. She was their ‘queen’. Maxine had ulcerative colitis, hated the steroids that changed her appearance, so gave them up, followed Belle instead and became sick. Pixie had high cholesterol and didn’t want to be put on statins. So she, too, went with Belle and developed an unhealthy obsession with healthy food (orthorexia). ‘I wasn’t allowed to eat anything with more than five ingredients in it,’ she says. Why, she is asked. ‘Someone on the internet made it up and it became a thing,’ she replies.
It all started to unravel in 2015 when an Australian journalist just couldn’t get over the fact that Belle had all this cancer going on and always looked ‘the very picture of health’. He started digging
Bad Influencer I have never said this before… but I wish that this had been longer
around and discovered that her claim of donating all company profits to charity was bogus. So what else wasn’t she telling the truth about?
Watch, and it’s fascinating the way it all comes out. She agrees to be interviewed on TV once the truth is known. ‘The diet worked for me,’ she keeps insisting. ‘But you didn’t have cancer,’ the exasperated interviewer keeps repeating.
You will be left with questions. For example, why didn’t Apple or Penguin perform any due diligence? Also, you didn’t ever get a proper sense of Belle. Does she have a personality disorder? Is that why she could rip off sick and vulnerable people and still sleep at night?
To be fair, she had tried to erase as much of her past as possible – although someone from her school days did pop up to say she’d always been a ‘pathological liar’ – but otherwise she remained a puzzle. This has a 45-minute running time and, as I’ve never said about a programme before and will probably never say again, I wish it had been longer. The actress, writer, director and absolute treasure that is Kathy Burke made a documentary a couple of years ago on what it is to be a woman today, which was wonderful, and now she’s back with the two-parter Money Talks. This week she tackled what it is to be rich, while next week she’s doing poor, and she knows what it is to be both, even if her rich isn’t yachts or designer handbags as it’s simply ‘having money to spare’.
For this week’s episode she was bundled into a taxi to visit Alfie Best, who is of Romany gipsy heritage (‘I was born in a caravan on the side of the road’) but now owns a mobile-home company worth £340m, and a Bugatti, and a Rolls-Royce, and a rare Jeep, and a mansion full of bespoke Italian furniture, and goes to work in a helicopter.
Burke was also bundled into a taxi to visit ‘a TikTok house’ – no, me neither – where the inhabitants earn hundreds of thousands a year but can’t make a cup of tea. There were others – she was bundled into a taxi a lot – but it did feel like a series of non-events throughout which she was supportive without ever being challenging. It was watchable enough but didn’t really have anything to say.
Also, I found her far more interesting than anyone she met. Here she is on what happened after she won the Best Actress award at Cannes (for the 1997 film Nil By Mouth): ‘I was suddenly invited to things run by Cartier. Elton John asked me round for dinner… nah, just wasn’t interested.’ More of that, and less of all the rest please.