Jamie Laing is really, really worried about money, guys

Cringe: part of you wants to laugh but what you’re seeing is uncomfortable. It makes your skin crawl. It’s embarrassing, it’s awkward, and like a motorway pile-up, you can’t take your eyes off it, even though you want to. This is Cringe of The Week. 

Today, multi-millionaire biscuit heir Jamie Laing started getting really, really worried about money on Good Morning Britain because he doesn’t want to die as a reality television star. Watch this from about two minutes  in.

An unexpected lesson from the above, from the comfy, chummy, pastel world of early morning TV natter: do not fuck with Good Morning Britain’s Kate Garraway. She will ask the hard questions other journalists shirk from asking, she will expose injustice wherever its ugly face appears, she will enlighten the masses and lead them to a fresher, rawer understanding of our world.

Quite simply, Kate Garraway will tell Made in Chelsea’s Jamie Laing that he is a rich boy, a posh boy, a boy who could, if he wanted to, pile up all his cash and roll around in it, like Smaug in a signet-ring. And she will do it live on ITV, for an audience of pensioners who are slowly dying in front of their plasma screens and single mothers who get Ian Duncan Smith all teary.

This is what happened when Kate Garraway went in on Jamie Laing, like a Frost-Nixon for people who own jumpers with the word “prosecco” embroidered on them.

Ollie Locke and Stephanie Pratt are in the Good Morning Britain studio, teeth white as china, deep vitamin tans. They’re enjoying one of those casual Ben Shepherd interviews, talking a lot without really saying anything.

Jamie Laing is there as well, showing off more chest than a professional wrestler, and he’s talking unusually today, he’s reflective, philosophical, maudlin:

“You can’t always just rest on a reality show because we can’t be 45 and still doing Made in Chelsea… it wouldn’t work.” 

What’s happening here? This isn’t the Jamie Laing you know from having your picture taken with him in a clubbing experience your mate Emma, to this day, describes with great justice as, “the worst”. No, this isn’t the Jamie Laing who gives out awards to fit freshers, who cavorts with half-naked Candy Kittens and calls it a business.

Here is Jamie Laing facing unresting death, which is a whole day nearer now. Jamie Laing up at 4am, peeling away to a hotel room window, the lights of the city blinking underneath him, thinking about a time when all thought will be impossible. Total emptiness – forever. No sight, no sound or smell or taste; no touch nor happiness nor fear. The great desolation that lies beyond, that’s what Jamie means when he says he doesn’t want to be messing around in Dirty Martini aged 45.

It’s a lot to take in for a man who was once paid to dress up like this by Volvic:

But I’ll tell you doesn’t have time for any of this we all die and my life is actually quite difficult bullshit. Kate Garraway. She turns this sombre meditation on mortality into the cringe of the week with one explosive question to our biscuity friend:

“To be fair you are the heir to the McVities fortune. You’re not really going to be struggling if it [Made in Chelsea] comes to an end.”

Jamie does that charming thing posh boys do when they’ve been rumbled, his cheeks expand like lungs, his nostrils palpitate, he goes red – redder than the reddest lobster you’ve ever seen – and he smiles bashfully, in a way that’s hard to resist, even though he’d rather like to skin Kate Garraway and hang her head on the wall for mentioning the concrete fact of his fortune, his privilege.

Stephanie Pratt says it first, what you’re thinking, what I’m thinking, what some people with jobs with the word “executive” in the title over at E4 are thinking: “Is this awkward for you.”

“No it’s fine,” says Jamie.

It’s not though is it?