Excellent article on Liberal Conspiracy about My Big Fat Gipsy Wedding

19 Feb 2012 Leave a Comment

by representingthemambo in Current Affairs, Opinions, Politics

I thought I would re-post this excellent article from Liberal Conspiracy.

Initially MBFGW completely passed me by as a cultural phenomenon but as time gone I’ve noticed it more and grown more and more uncomfortable with it. Rather than being an affectionate celebration of a social group with an alternative lifestyle it appears more and more to be cruel, intentional mockery that reinforces popular prejudices about travellers. Right now we seem more keen than ever to find scapegoats to pick on, and this, allied with much of the British public’s crass voyeurism and TV executives desire to get good ratings figures at any cost, produces TV like MBFGW.

It’s the sort of thing that makes me very uneasy indeed. Of course they have let themselves be filmed. But that doesn’t mean that the people doing the filming have the right to exploit them for advertisng revenue. And that is what this about, in the final analysis. 

It’s worth going to the original article to read some of the comments underneath. Unfortunately it is part and parcel of the left wing blogosphere that it draws the attentions of weirdos and right-wing cranks with their pet theories on how the world works based on their ‘experience’, and their desperate desire to shout down anyone who questions their narrow-minded ‘wisdom’. The ignorance on show is breathtaking. If I was as stupid and uninformed as those people are I would at least have the good grace to keep my mouth shut.

Bigger. Fatter. Gypsier. More Racist.

by Guest    
February 19, 2012 at 12:03 pm
contribution by Joseph Cottrell-Boyce

 

I have a confession to make; when ‘My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding’ first aired as a one-off documentary two years ago, I didn’t think it was that bad.

Having been acclimatised to Daily Mail Gypsies-camped-in-my-living-room-and-ate-my-babies type hate mongering, the show was in contrast, fairly gentle.

Voyeuristic and misleading no-doubt, but I was pleased to see issues affecting the community, such as evictions and discrimination, being aired to a mainstream audience. At the very least, I thought, ‘it can’t do any harm’.

How wrong I was.

Fast forward two years and MBFGW has become a cultural phenomenon; Channel Four’s highest rated programme since Big Brother, syndicated internationally and a favourite talking point of the tabloid press. The programme makers claim that the show throws ‘an overdue light on a secretive, marginalised and little-understood segment of our society’.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Far from increasing understanding, the incredible reach of the show has succeeding in propagated a warped depiction of Travellers in the UK, objectifying an entire ethnic group for the sake of light entertainment.

The programme focuses almost exclusively on a handful of wealthy Traveller families with a penchant for extravagant celebrations. Self-sufficiency and entrepreneurship are central to Traveller culture and some families have done very well; but the vast majority of Travellers in the UK who live below the poverty line are conspicuous by their absence from the programme.

MBFGW’s characterisation of Travellers as a wealthy care-free bunch masks the fact that 20% of Britain’s caravan-dwelling Travellers are statutorily homeless; trapped in traumatic cycles of eviction. That Gypsies and Travellers have a life expectancy 10 – 12 years below the national average.

That 18% of Gypsy and Traveller mothers have experienced the death of a child, compared with less than 1% of mothers in the settled community. That 62% of adult Gypsies and Travellers are illiterate and 25% of Gypsy and Traveller children in Britain are not enrolled in education.

That a staggering 4% of the adult male prison estate is comprised of Gypsy, Traveller and Roma prisoners, many of whom have graduated from the care system. These statistics paint a grim picture of the Traveller experience in Britain; one that is a million miles from the high jinks of MBFGW.

The programmes producers claim that they merely ‘film what they see’ but this is clearly disingenuous, neglecting the power which they wield in deciding what makes the final cut. Of course commercial television is going to focus on the bizarre and titillating to secure an audience, and Travellers are not the first group to be exploited via the medium of reality TV.

But there is something particularly distasteful about adding to the already bulging cannon of stereotypes and slurs which the Travelling community has to endure. While it may ‘cast a light’ on some frilly dresses and mammoth cakes, the programme does very little to illuminate the myriad disadvantages and injustices which the community endures.

Joe Cottrell-Boyce is a Policy Officer at the ICB’s Traveller’s Project