Why success on a plate leaves bad taste
ACYNIC or a Stranglers fan might try to tell you that there are no more heroes any more, but I don’t know. Whenever I see a young person beating all the odds to make a success of their life, I am filled with nothing short of awe.
I’m thinking of one category of youngsters in particular: the offspring of famous people. Try to imagine, if it is not too distressing, what it must be like to have a celebrity parent working in a profession that is notoriously difficult to get into – television presenting, say, or modelling.
Just consider, if you can bear it, the effort required for children in these circumstances to ask mum or dad over the dining table to put a word in for them. Think, please, of the agony as those kids glide up the career ladder, never knowing the hardship of a setback or the embarrassment of a telling off.
Fair makes your heart bleed, doesn’t it?
Sarcasm truly is the lowest form of wit, but my goodness it is called for at times. Particularly on reading about a new documentary series coming our way next year. Born Famous will take the sons and daughters of celebrities and take them back to their parents’ roots to show them the sort of life they might have had. It’s a bit like when Jim Bowen used to show Bullseye contestants the speedboat they could have won, but not as amusing.
Born Famous will be made by Gordon Ramsay’s production company, Studio Ramsay, and blow me down with a sheet of greaseproof paper if the chef’s son, Jack, 18, isn’t taking part. Bethany Mone, daughter of Michelle, also features alongside the daughters of a former Spice Girl and a footballer. Jack will go back to the part of Oxfordshire where his dad grew up after moving from Renfrewshire, while Bethany is heading for Bridgeton in Glasgow.
According to the 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, while confronting feelings of privilege, class and celebrity and uncovering the realities of social mobility in 2018.”
There we are then. The show is not a grossly insulting, patronising example of nepotism in action, it’s a serious sociological study, innit?
Aye right, as Miss Mone will find they say in Glasgow. a council house wall. One night in a sleeping bag with a camera crew nearby is not the same as being terrified to go to sleep lest you be assaulted, urinated on, or plagued by rats: all of which homeless people have been known to encounter.
One wonders what Master Ramsay and Miss Mone will learn about how their parents succeeded by walking in their old shoes for one whole week.
Isn’t the lesson of Ramsay’s and Mone’s success that one has to have a natural talent which is honed during years of hard graft and sacrifice? One could say they succeeded because they did not have anything handed to them on a plate. That is the example their children should be following.
But hey, let us not be too harsh. It must be awful not being able to drop your famous surname and connections and go it alone like other people’s children.
To see where that leads may I direct you to no better place than Sky Atlantic , which is currently showing a brilliant drama called Succession. Starring Brian Cox as the head of a media conglomerate who refuses to step aside and let his spoiled children take over, it is a cautionary tale for any parent, especially famous ones.
Making it on your own may be tougher, take longer, and require much in the way of blood, sweat and tears, but success, if it comes, is all the sweeter. Try that recipe, Master Ramsay.