Chelsea’s bitches are back Why have the sloanes gone soft?

Everyone’s favourite Made in Chelsea “character”, a true agent of chaos, was Spencer Matthews. In a pre-MeToo world he was just about acceptable — a medium-ugly Jack the Lad who meted out schadenfreude to every woman who was too nice and too pretty to go unscathed. The most memorable of which has to be his spectacular 2013 break-up with Louise Thompson, staged on Putney Bridge. Years later, Matthews revealed that the two had broken up off-camera the night before — only to be told to recreate the moment by producers. “It’s hard to respect you when you allow me to cheat on you,” he immortally told the sobbing 22-year-old. Having lately rebranded as a recovering alcoholic and fitness influencer, Matthews said of the scene, “I feel embarrassed about it.” So he should, but from what I recall of the time, he was only burnished by his misbehaviour.

What distinguished MiC from other scripted-reality shows of its day was a vibe of aspirational refinement. Unlike the fake-tanned, fake-breasted northerners chunning in local the Popworld on Geordie Shore, its bright young things attended shooting parties on rented estates, hosted flapper-themed “soirées” and, in fits of pique, swilled not pints but Bolly. At least, that was what we saw. The reality, I suspect, must have been quite different — one hears whispers about the dysfunctional lives of the programmes’ young cast members, their days-long benders and, through the thick fog of privilege and addiction, being riled up by producers to lash out at one another like snakes milked for venom.

The facade of untouchable poshness, unique among reality programmes of this era, sweetened the satisfaction of tiffs and spats: this show was at once a moving Pinterest board (at my school, predictably, many girls dreamt of slinking down the King’s Road in a freshly waxed Barbour with K-Middleton chestnut curls) and deliciously sadistic. Every episode stages a fall from grace for a girl who is too envied to last, answering the blend of awe and disdain which such upper-crust women tend to inspire. Nobody wants to see Downton’s Mary Crawley end up with boring old Matthew in sickening harmony — we want to see him paralysed below the waist during the First World War then bumped off in a car crash after welcoming the couple’s first child, leaving her wracked by grief and hardship.

The truth is, we like our posh women to be victims. The privilege and vulnerability they embody places them at a tantalising sweet spot for contempt; comeuppance for prized “brats” like Lucy Watson always came with a whispered threat: nobody is too posh to be called a bitch. Even the nice ones are prodded into teary scenes wherever possible — pain purifies, and neutralises viewers’ envy. Their grandness also made them fair game for misogyny, an impulse which was otherwise beginning to be restrained on mainstream TV by the mid-2010s.

Besides, in the broader villain dynamics of scripted reality, men and women have prescribed roles. It’s far easier to swallow roguery in a chummy group of Harrovians than in their catty girlfriends; the format ensures that scenes of dark goings-on in members’ clubs evaporate in the sepia sunlight of a friendly Clapham Common rugby throwabout. The girls, by contrast, are never afforded this cleansing camaraderie — they are doomed to sit, pouting, in coffee shops, mooning over cheaters and slinging bitchy remarks about bags. The upshot of this dynamic is that the men of Made in Chelsea were able to tear their way through 10-plus series with little reputational damage, bar the odd well-deserved slap. Many, Sam Thompson and Jamie Laing included, are heading for national-treasure status at breakneck speed.

The women, conversely, had much shorter shelf-lives; many of them, Louise Thompson included, clearly underwent massive emotional trauma which has echoed in later life. Others, such as “fat fucking turkey” Francesca Hull, are haunted by their time on the show. The unforgettable line was hurled by arch-villainess Victoria Baker-Harber during a festive dinner party in 2013. After an exchange of fire from various girls as slack-jawed boyfriends looked on — “this cheese smells as bad as Lucy’s breath”; “I don’t ever see you eat, ever — you’re an anorexic” — Baker-Harber tells an emollient Hull, in a clip which she has said followed her around forever: “Stop opening your fucking fat mouth you fucking fat turkey!”

Hull has since revealed that, in a room “full of cameramen, producers, sound men”, she had tried to leave, but “there was a producer under the table holding my legs down, and she was saying, ‘No, fight back’”. At other times, the crew “spoke to us on the phone for hours every week. They’d come on nights out with us. They put us in situations that created drama”, Hull told Grazia.

When scripted reality was first a thing, I sense that we all knew this — it was all slightly rougher, with drama inexpertly cut in. Now, though, as boundaries between celebrities and “real people” collapse on social media, producers’ wiles have caught up: it’s harder and harder to detect narrative artifice, and so, for young viewers in particular, to challenge the garish visions of sex and class in which these programmes trade.

We are no longer in a world in which bullied girls are held under tables by goading executives. Light-entertainment TV has had a heavy reckoning — from the Jeremy Kyle Show to This Morning. The trajectories of former Made in Chelsea cast members are depressingly predictable: many of the show’s biggest hellraisers are now wellness influencers — nobody hawks essential oils like a former cocaine addict — or, judging by OG gentle oddball Francis Boulle’s Twitter, alt-Right crypto traders. Present iterations such as Married at First Sight and Love is Blind attempt to whip up the same villainy, the winking caricatures, the ritualistic savagery of that era. But the unctuous brutality of 2010s TV production has been sapped away by years of Love Island suicides and interventions by Women’s Aid.

That time has left a strange legacy for my generation. Such shows service an emotional need to process thorny class elements of British culture. In Made in Chelsea’s case, it was a way of understanding breezy privilege, poking fun at it and indulging in our most Victorian fantasies about what goes on behind the shutters of Cadogan Square, in a country recently rocked by the 2008 financial crash, and which had just elected its first Tory government in 13 years. Now, after a comparable changing of the political guard, pop culture is having another dalliance with the upper classes: Saltburn, The Gentlemen and a new adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals are, depending on how you look at it, last-days-of-Rome takes on the end stages of Conservative collapse or much-desired correctives to the bleakness of Starmerism.

Nowadays, producers are much more careful — mindful, they would say — about dealing in baroque and, sometimes, offensive visions of class that abounded in 2010s reality TV. The exception for lampooning remains, for good reason, posh people. And it just so happens that they are also, for the time being, a lasting fixation, perfect aspirational hate-watch material. The brutality of the sets which produced these stereotypes may be gone — but can we ever banish our infatuation with the Sloane?

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Poppy Sowerby is an UnHerd columnist

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