Made In Chelsea

In a wild departure for the 104^th blogpost spectacular (please make sure you’ve read them all or don’t speak to me anymore) I’m branching out to sneer at a show I don’t actually watch.  Made In Chelsea popped politely onto our screens in 2011 and, of the 17 series and five abroad specials so far (and counting) I would say I am about 199 episodes short of the 200 plus that have cluttered up various e4 schedules in the eight years since.  But that doesn’t stop me weighing in with a few thoughts and observations, as its cultural influence is so great that even non-viewers like me can’t exist quietly without a passing awareness of its stars and storylines.  To summarise the action for those that have never tuned in for the adventures of Proudlock, Mark-Francis, Jamie, Victoria and chums, Made In Chelsea is a scripted reality show following a bunch of the well-groomed progeny of wealthy families living it up in London’s cash-drenched SW3 while dating each other silly.  In my (very grown-up) job alone, teams have used Chelsea talent in advertising campaigns and even sponsored the bloody show itself.  I don’t know if I could sit through an episode (and we all know I’ll watch anything) but let’s celebrate this modern juggernaut that yields no signs of stopping.

We’ll talk casting first.  In a noughties update of the Sloane Ranger, Made In Chelsea’s guys and gals are all posh.  In fact, it’s probably the main thing about the whole production.  This has a great bonus in creating watchable telly.  Posh people have often had access to good educations.  As such, the cast members are all more articulate than your average attention seeker.  They know the long words and that.  In addition, there’s something about their boarding school humour that layers a little bit of wittiness over the top.  That, and some cracking diction that hits every consonant, never dropping an H, gives the snob in us all an aspirational viewing experience.  I’m not saying posh people are better than normos like us, but let’s face it, they are worth more (based on the investment in their education).  But it’s not just the cast that are filtered to create a better version of reality…

The locations!  After 12 years living in London, I’ll be the first to admit it can be a hideous hellhole.  When the skies are grey and the drizzle persistent, there are concrete neighbourhoods that can bring a man to weeping, whether you’re stuck on a bus on Southampton Row or picking litter off your shoe in Clapham Junction.  Somehow, however, the researchers, location scouts and producers on Made In Chelsea make the city look immaculate.  Maybe it’s the lenses they use, or the fact they stay around the King’s Road, or perhaps they have an inordinate budget for special effects, but every location the cast rock up at for passive-aggressive discussions of dating etiquette makes you want to go there.  It could be a bar you know is shit – Made In Chelsea will have you grabbing your coat and heading out the door before your Millennial mind can repossess its senses.  Then you realise that you can’t actually afford to be out all the time, as your parents didn’t found the McVitie’s biscuit empire, reminding us all that London is a great place, but only if you’re rich.

And so we come on to how Made In Chelsea really has nothing to do with reality.  We’re not simply a fly on the wall.  Instead, each scene is set up with rigorous control.  Sure, the conceit is that two big-haired young rahs have run into each other on the street, but the establishing tracking shots and the fact than any homeless people have been cajoled out of screen betray a strong sense that everything is ruthlessly planned.  Ours ear are bathed in an expertly curated soundtrack (while the theme music, Midnight City by M83, has been used in every media creds reel I ever seen in my job over the last eleven years), which then fades out so the awkward dialogue may start.  I know I’ve mentioned the cast are good conversationalists, but, for some unknown reason, every scene only cranks into gear after several verbal misfires that not only make my toes curl up, they rip themselves off and run out the room screaming.  Here’s how our exchanges usually begin, following on from the interstitial shots of the road name sign or someone pouring cocktails:

“Oh hey Hortense; how lovely to see you.”

“Spiffy – I didn’t expect to see you here.”

*air kiss, air kiss, air kiss*

“So, how are you?”

“Oh, you know, really busy.  How are you?”

“Really busy.”

*awkward pause*

“It’s fortuitous that I have seen you really because, er, I wanted to…”

And then you just insert any of the following and you have yourself an episode:

“I wanted to ask you about last night with Arabella.”

“I wanted to know why you have been talking about Winston.”

“I wanted to let you know that I also really really like Georgie.”

If that imagined script has failed to bring it to life for you, then please watch this excellent parody from Watson & Oliver that perfectly captures the inanity.  People call this entertainment, but it’s no different to being pulled for a chat around the gardens of the Love Island villa, only the latter situation has more brow sweat and fewer items of clothing.  But this is where my interest dies: the Made In Chelsea storylines revolve solely around dating.  It’s as if they are all terrified of being alone (with their millions).  If I were them, I would focus on enjoying my life (and my money) and maybe volunteer in the community, certain that true love would find me only when I was least expecting it.  But that wouldn’t make very good drama, would it?

Where the wheels really come off is any multi-cast member party scene.  Aimless extras shuffle about clutching drinks while our romantic leads are brought to the fore to thrash out whatever dating shenanigans we have all lost interest in.  Loud music would interfere with the mics, so everyone must sway in time to silence so that the tunes can be added later, giving things an even more stilted edge than normal.

But I’m not a hater of Made In Chelsea.  There are many things to love.  You can’t beat a posh nickname, with many of the girls monickered with increasingly euphemistic ones, from Caggie to Toff to Binky.  Why not just be done with it and introduce the following new cast members: Jizzy, Flappy and Titty?  Either way, the Chelsea lot are always charming – Cheska was beyond professional when she did commercial work for us, while those that have popped up in Celebrity Big Brother or I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here have been a joy to have on screen.  I’ve even bumped into Spencer at my gym, and by bump, I mean I almost fell over his dog.

So, in the world of reality TV, Made In Chelsea is like the King’s Road – it’s nicer than the alternatives.  Whereas shopping on Oxford Street with the great unwashed hordes requires having to press the button and wait for the green man so you can be chased across the road by an angry cab driver while carrying your poverty-indicating Primark bags, the King’s Road has lovely zebra crossings so you can strut out into traffic at any juncture, beelining for Jack Wills, and the BMWs and Mercedes politely halt lest you be turned into expensive roadkill.  London is run for the wealthy, by the downtrodden, but watching Made In Chelsea at least gives you an hour’s fantasy that you’re rubbing shoulders with the right crowd.

Miranda

Sometimes, you need to make sure you have enough silliness in your life.  I don’t mean harmful silliness, like dragging the UK out of the EU because economically inactive pensioners are scared of foreigners, or panicking about a handful of migrants crossing the Channel to be absorbed into a wealthy country of 66 million people.  I mean fun silliness, like being unable to resist the urge to gallop instead of walk down long empty corridors, or pulling rude faces at your colleagues when you spot them bored in glass meeting rooms.  You can probably tell that the silliness evident in these posts is also embraced in most areas of my life.  One environment that gets more than its fair share of my own personal brand of silliness is the office.  There’s something about such a grey, grown-up, corporate environment, all furious typing and professional profile raising, that makes me want to respond with laughter.  After a feral childhood, spending adult daytimes for the last 11 years in the UV-deficient glow of computer screens could have been crushing.  But, if enough silliness happens, the subsequent belly laughs are enough to stave off the threat of submitting to being a full worker drone.  Sadly, one of my closest partners in silliness recently fled our office home after many years of laughing till we cried.  I therefore found myself with a silliness deficit in my day-to-day existence.

But there, nestling among multimillion dollar new content on Netflix was the old BBC sitcom Miranda.  I was helpless, working through all three series in no time at all.  I hereby announce a new genre of TV: comfort telly.  In my friend’s absence, and in the face of other things in life I would describe as bad (Brexit, gluten, people who sit behind me on the bus at 6.30am after smoking so many cigarettes that I am unwillingly bathed in their tobacco-riddled breath, misplaced apostrophes throughout the media industry), watching Miranda brought cheer to some dreary January evenings.

Most importantly of all, I have to stress that my friend is nothing like Miranda.  They are polar opposites.  She has a high-powered career for which she has to wear roll necks, whereas Miranda pootles about in a joke shop she set up with some inheritance.  My friend has a top-notch husband, whereas the main joke about Miranda is her disastrous love life.  While Miranda’s idea of a good meal is to catch crumbled chocolate biscuits in her mouth while using a hair dryer to blow them off the table (biscuit blizzard), my friend has promised me one of her famous weekend roasts (not a euphemism).  I could go on.  The main point is that their only common trait is their love of silliness.

We’ll go into the exact ingredients of this silliness, but we should dwell for a moment on the polarising nature of this sitcom.  Most people’s responses to my evangelising about the joys of rewatching Miranda have been wailing indignation that I could subject myself to something so unfunny.  I’m happy to be told I’ve got bad taste, but I think Miranda’s perceived unfunniness is more complex than that.  I’ll grant you that you can see some punchlines coming a mile off, but it’s that predictable payoff, with Miranda Hart’s silly charm, that can be so reassuring and comforting.  The show came about at a time when comedy was moving away from the obvious sitcom (like The Office).  Conversely, Miranda embraced the format, adding to the presence of the live studio audience by ending each episode with the cast waving at the camera and dancing before their fans like an amateur village panto.  Two words: such fun.

Right then, here’s how Miranda is silly:

She is a show off

One of our hero’s celebrated foibles is her awkwardness in social situations, but her response to sensing a faux-pas is to behave worse and worse until the awkwardness is exacerbated beyond the human ability to cringe any further.  If a throwaway sentence stumbles into a song lyric, she’ll launch into the next verse and chorus, veering between shyness and attention seeking.

She looks at the camera

Perhaps the biggest sitcom crime of all, but the one that makes me laugh the most.  The knowing glances she shares with us when her mother, Penny, is being awful, or when she is quite pleased with how she has handled something elevate a standard joke to something much more hilarious.

She enjoys how words sound

Cusp.  Thrust.  Moist.  English has a vocabulary in the hundreds of thousands, so it’s inevitable that some of those words are more fun on the tongue than others.  Miranda will pause mid-argument to enjoy the repetition of such words, always finishing with a final flourish of saying it directly to the audience via the classic look to the camera.  Cue laughter from me which I am not sorry about.

She falls over

I laugh every time because it’s silly.  It’s not big, it’s not clever, but this is my level.  I also crack a smile every time she pushes best friend, Stevie, off a stool.

She breaks wind

See previous comment about my level of humour.  It’s not so much the parp that gets me, but her surprise at having done it.

She is posh

Posh people are silly – you just have to hang around a Waitrose to realise this.  And their expectations of each other are even sillier.  Miranda might never be able to escape her boarding school days, but it makes for a pleasant stream of nonsense.

She is from Surrey

I suppose this is linked to the above, but this county really is ridiculous, and I therefore glory in any lampooning of it in popular media.  Being so close to London (making Surrey the patio of England to Kent’s garden) the million people that occupy its four-bedroom homes are often overlooked in culture, but their silliness deserves the spotlight.

But her friends are sillier

We’ve mentioned Stevie, owner of the allure, the Heather Small cut-out and very diminutive proportions.  There’s soulmate Gary, whose own stupid inability to commit to Miranda contrives to give the various series some dramatic tension, as it can’t be all about falling over and accidentally farting.  Sally Phillips gets the best lines as Tilly, the boarding school pal who peppers her passive aggression by spicing up all her words with suffix flourishes that nobody needs, declaring things tremendulant or exclaiming about major disaster and his friend, colonel cock-up, all while demanding others “bear with” when reviewing text messages or ending conversation by declaring “c’est fini.”  See, if you had someone to make eyes at now, you’d be doing it.  So much of Miranda’s silliness comes from laughing at her friends’ behaviour.

So, hello to you, Miranda Hart, and kind regards thank you caller (this is a reference to in-show dialogue, not me padding out the words).  You are a champion of the many, those of us who know our real life can’t be filtered, so we might as well embrace its silliness.  I’ve loved her ever since I saw her cameo in Nighty Night (not a euphemism again) and having her back in my life as a vegeta-pal has been just the dose of silliness I have needed.