Want to see how unfair Britain really is? Just look in the jungle
WHO needs John Major to warn us of the shocking inequality in Britain today when we have the cast of this year’s I’m A Celebrity...Get Me Out Of Here!!!! On one side we have Ferne McCann and Vicky Pattison, the working-class ‘stars’ of The Only Way Is Essex and Geordie Shore respectively, who have sold their souls to the great God of TV in order to afford a down payment on a DFS sofa. On the other side are the privileged, aristocratic Susannah Constantine, former fashion expert, and Lady Colin Campbell, socialite and former wife of the son of the 11th Duke of Argyll, who breeze through the challenges much as they have always sailed through life.
Susannah – the type who bullied me in high school and made a ‘career’ out of telling other women they should disguise their saddle bags – was warned before she went into the show by her 12-year-old daughter Cece (the reason posh children are given these sorts of names is to weed out unsuitable suitors later in life; if you can’t spell Cariad or Isolde, you don’t get to date our offspring; simpler than a prenup) to ‘try and shower where people can’t see you, so they don’t realise you’re a fat hippo’.
But posh women like Susannah, with her Bridget Jones knickers, red cheeks and make- up-free face, have absolutely no concept of what it is to have even a modicum of self-doubt.
While Essex girls like me have veneers cemented on our little stubs of teeth – eroded by a diet consisting only of Cox’s apples – and starve ourselves and have boob jobs to make us bigger or smaller, Susannah’s teeth remind me of the Queen Mum’s.
She reveals she ‘lives for food’. She thinks nothing of drinking a cocktail of unspeakable parts of some poor creature’s anatomy, as she undoubtedly grew up on jugged hare and eviscerated pheasant. She tries to bond with the reality TV girls, much in the way she might, I’m sure, talk to waiters or people who park her filthy, clapped-out car (only the working class aspire to a brand new Lexus convertible).
To Vicky she enquires, ‘What’s the premise of your show?’ This to a young woman whose solution to losing too much weight was not to eat more carbs but to have silicone inserted into her breasts, and who showed her sweetness and naivety – qualities unchanged in pretty young women with little education since the 1960s – by responding: ‘I had sex on TV. But I didn’t do it in the first series.’
LADY Colin Campbell, who believes the voting public are an abstract quality, has seen fit to wear pearls on the show, and lend a bracelet to Ferne and Vicky. ‘Lady C’s pearls in the jungle are better than our going out stuff!’ they coo’d. Of course they are.
The cast and even Ant and Dec try to make fun of Lady Colin by affecting Jamaican patois, given that is where she grew up, or making jokes about her age (‘She’s an old bird’, and ‘I’ll be her age by the time she’s finished telling that story’) but you can tell they are all terrified.
No wonder Downton creator Julian Fellowes has made it known he’s a fan.
And even though Lady C is only in the jungle to afford a new roof for her castle, the most telling aspect of the whole show, and other shows like it, is that even when working-class people with talent or just luck or looks earn huge amounts of money, the inequality in our society is not righted, it just shines brighter, like Brian Friedman’s mouth (he’s a choreographer, apparently).
Breeding will always, always out. If you acquire money with a background like mine, or Vicky’s, you spend the rest of your life terrified you will lose it. You have no idea how to look after it, invest it, spend it wisely. You don’t read the small print of a contract, you just grasp it tightly.
It is interesting that, when I did Celebrity Big Brother two years ago, pretty much every person in the house, people who had spent years on the road performing, getting up at dawn with no private life, was there because they were penniless. They had sold millions of records, say, but had made next to nothing.
One housemate even had the bailiffs turn up as they had seen him on the show. When news of this leaked, I swear six faces, including mine, turned ashen. Because this is how the world works: those of us who sell product for huge empires are always pegged out for the crows to pick over our flesh. We are grateful to inhabit the same playing field, even if the gradient is so acute we have to cling on by our acrylic nails, while Susannah and Lady C sit on thrones and will probably come first and second in a show and a society that’s as rotten as Susannah’s teeth.