It’s Sunday morning, and as I type this, I’m watching the cast from Made in Chelsea get more-than-slightly ridiculed on T4. The presenters are asking them to perform such complicated and thought-provoking tasks such as ‘Name the members of N Dubz’, ‘Guess the flavour of the pasty’ and ‘Put the pin on the map where Newcastle is’. Because of course, wealthy inhabitants of Chelsea would never have a clue where their Geordie counterparts live. Or how to open a can of beans. They have butlers for that, darling! ‘Wow Binky, look how fast you opened that can of beans!’ says one of them.

Is this really where entertainment has taken us? Not content with poking fun at ‘the wide ranging demographic’ of the British Public in shows such as Big Brother – which in the end descended from being a mildly fascinating social experiment to little more than people on the fringes of society being gawked at like animals in a cage – we now have this strange new genre of the ‘docu-soap’. It’s a strange, reality-but-not-really based, fly on the wall type of show which offers insight into what I can only describe as grossly caricatured and two-dimensionally depicted lives.

It’s not the cast of Made in Chelsea/Geordie Shore/The Only Way Is Essex’s fault – they are victims of not only harsh editing and scripting but also the current obsession with fame for fame’s sake. The cast of The Only Way Is Essex are now celebrities in their own right; because they were depicted as ‘normal people’ on their programme. Is that right? The draw of shows such these is either a) These people are just like me, I like that or b) These people are nothing like me, I like that. You don’t watch them because they’re famous, you watch them because they’re not famous. It was meant to be the antidote to celebrity saturation; the idea that these people like you and me (if you wish to be regionally stereotyped) are within our own scope of aspirations – if you live in Essex and have your own beauty parlour, this was you. If you live in Chelsea and like to say ‘gosh’ and ‘totes’ a lot, here you are. So as soon as they start getting invited to and appearing in all the things you’re not invited to – aren’t they just the same as every other celebrity in the weekly magazines? They are famous because they are on a TV show which was supposed to be about un-famous people.

The worst part of these docu-soaps are the stereotypes they are pedalling, and the inevitable prejudice that the media are only making worse. Only recently, Baroness Hussein-Ece has been berated for using the word Chav in a tweet; considering she is the minister for equality, it’s not particularly a good move. But is calling someone who is from a working class/lower income background a Chav worse than calling someone a Toff if they went to Oxford and own some horses? It’s still ignorance, and it’s still prejudice, even if that prejudice seems to be widely accepted and even sometimes glamorised and perpetuated in the media.

So what do you think about the new docu-soaps? Do you love The Only Way is Essex for its tongue in cheek and occasionally unintentional wit, or does putting the inhabitants of Chelsea on our screens only worsen the perceived class divide? How would you feel if you were being represented by the cast of Geordie Shore? How far will our obsession with celebrity and fame go?

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