And just when you thought showbiz nepotism couldn’t sink any lower...

NOT all nepotism is nauseating. We do not condemn the grocer who gives his son or daughter a job in the family store – or the farmer who fast-tracks his offspring rather than a hired hand.

In the entertainment world, Paul McCartney has occasionally invited his son James to play drums or guitar on his albums. Tom Jones’s son Mark is his father’s manager. I suspect there were no auditions or interviews for either.

In the real world, if our sons or daughters were anxious to follow in our professional footsteps, we would be strange parents indeed if we withheld wisdom which might help them succeed, perhaps even give them an advantage over the pack.

I have no problem with any of these examples of nepotism and the reasons why are familiar enough to most of us. Blood really is thicker than water. Who would see their son or daughter stuck? Being the plodding musician son of Beatle Paul cannot be an easy gig.

Then we come to that other kind of nepotism, the variety which assaults the senses like a rotting carcass or a waiter’s halitosis, the sort which brings instant gasps of outrage followed by lingering sadness that the world is such a place and that we, as consumers, allow it to be so.

A new reality TV show from the stable of that most overexposed of celebrity chefs Gordon Ramsay is a case in point. It stars the fruit of his loins Jack, 18, and another 18year-old called Bethany whose mother is the lingerie tycoonturned habitual House of Lords absentee Baroness Mone.

Born Famous, the Channel 4 series is called, and our hackles should be alert straight away. Neither Jack Ramsay nor Bethany Mone were born famous. They are not Prince George and Princess Charlotte, debuting whether they like it or not before the world’s Press within hours of exit from the womb.

Indeed many, if not most, celebrities battle like lions to protect their children’s very lack of fame and strive to keep it that way by insisting the youngsters are not pictured in newspapers or magazines.

No, Born Famous is better understood in this instance as 18 And Desperate To Be Famous Like My FameObsessed Parent.

Wretched

Not that Jack or Bethany or any of the other children of celebrities lined up to take part in this wretched business are the primary nausea-inducers.

It takes cynics longer in the tooth than they for that – people such as Gordon Ramsay himself, whose TV company Studio Ramsay will produce the show, and the publicity spinners who would have us believe the object for these silver-spoon teens is to ‘confront their feelings of privilege, class and celebrity’.

It takes a special kind of arrogance to suppose the most meaningful way of engineering this confrontation is to plonk them for a week in the neighbourhoods their celebrity parents left behind at the first sniff of success.

‘They will be sent to the communities their superstar parents grew up in to discover what their own lives would be like today,’ goes the breathless blurb. ‘Each privileged teen will be paired with a local teenager to discover how their lives would have turned out if their parents hadn’t had the opportunities that came their way.’ Thereafter, of course, each privileged teen will return to their ostentatious homesteads to await further television offers.

And so the good people of Bridgeton in Glasgow’s East End await the arrival of Bethany Mone to remark, one presumes, on the absence of en suites there, while young Jack Ramsay will slum it in the Oxfordshire council estate where his father lived after his family uprooted from Renfrewshire.

And the object of the exercise is... what exactly? To see how the other half live? To deliver, in the words of producer Helen Cooke, ‘searingly honest accounts of what it is like for young people growing up in Britain’?

I have no doubt there are young people in Glasgow’s East End and Bretch Hill, Oxfordshire, who are more than capable of communicating that without the help of pampered teens getting a foot up into showbiz from mummy or daddy.

Worse than all of the above, however, is the wholly offensive subtext – that people growing up in down at heel communities are trapped there and, without a lottery win or the million to one shot of a parent breaking into showbiz, they are condemned to lives without sparkle or luxury.

Twaddle. Inspiring success stories emerge from communities like these all the time. Hard work makes them happen; commitment; imagination; enthusiasm. And yes, sometimes sound parental guidance plays a part too.

Patronising

How patronising to others of Jack Ramsay and Bethany Mone’s age to suggest young lives are pre-determined by their parents’ lucky breaks.

So here is a different idea for a reality TV programme. Select a bunch of articulate teenagers from housing estates across the UK and send them to live for a week in one or more of the parental homes of Master Ramsay, Miss Mone and their ilk.

See the visitors clock the multi-thousand pound coffee machines, the walk-in wardrobes and fridges and the oceans of cash swilling around those young adults’ lives and watch for the moment the penny drops and they understand that, for all the gloss, these kids are no better, brighter or more talented than they are. And certainly no more deserving of success.

Whoever comes out of it with most credibility should be given more TV work.