My Big Fat Gypsy Lie

EMILY GARSIDE on Channel Four’s failure to portray the ‘reality’ of reality television.

channel four gipsy OFCOM stereotype wedding

Channel Four has hit the ratings jackpot with their six part series My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding.  A recent episode saw a whopping 8.2 million viewers tune in for more ‘cutting edge’ action, the channel’s highest ratings since Jade Goody’s glorious come back in Celebrity Big Brother 2007.

Whilst enjoying a classy cocktail in ‘Spoons’ last week, I happened to bump into one of the ‘gypsies’ that the programme claims to represent. After she introduced herself and her friend as ‘pikeys’ I wondered aloud whether she too had had a wedding dress the size of a small elephant. With a tone of indignation she explained that ‘no gypsies are actually like that’.

It seems that my new friend was not alone in her outrage. The programme claims that its “unprecedented access to the UK’s most secretive communities, will take you to the very heart of gypsy life”. Through an exploration of “extravagant children’s parties, the biggest weddings on earth and life from birth all the way to the grave”, Channel Four proposes it can destroy the stereotype  which cloaks the UK’s modern traveller community.  However, many members of the travelling communities have paradoxically been left feeling insulted, degraded and stereotyped.

Their protests are justified.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HAUmII_hcg

Throughout the programme the patronising voice-over incessantly talks of ‘culture’, ‘community’ and ‘tradition’. Whilst it is important that our society is culturally open – in order to truly understand another group’s culture, it should not be at the expense of truth, nor in order to replace old stereotypes with new ones.

One Scottish traveller explained to the BBC why the programme remains entirely ignorant of her culture and the different regional strands which the term ‘traveller’ encompasses.

Referring to the skimpy clothes and spray tans donned by the six year old girls, she explains that “Irish travellers are completely different from Scottish travellers; we would never allow our children to dress that way”.  No such diversity is in any way acknowledged by Channel Four.

All communities have flamboyant characters, (you only need to flick through any given copy of Hello to see this) but for Channel Four to focus on the extravagant, rather than the hard every day realities which face these communities is simply irresponsible. Perhaps even dangerous. ‘The Travellers’ Times’ have gone so far as to contact Ofcom.

Not only are they disappointed by the scale to which their communities have been misrepresented, they are concerned by the negative repercussions this programme might have. The show has the potential to fool an audience – extreme cases leading to ‘harm and offence’.

Although often lost amidst repeated images of fake-tanned children (see, even I’ve had to repeat the reference), there are more realistic glimpses of the issues which face Britain’s traveller culture. One episode did briefly dwell on the eviction of a family caught up in planning laws, which resulted in the bulldozing of their six year home. Similarly the everyday discrimination which these communities grow up with is poignantly revealed when a young girl taking her holy communion in a gargantuous pink dress is mocked by her school mates.

Yes, the dress was absurd, but it was saddening and somewhat awkward to watch a snippet of the ridicule this girl must encounter each day.

Perhaps that’s why the discussion returned to the more jocular depiction of nine year olds strutting their stuff and whipping their hair back on forth on the dance floor?

Crude stereotypes are bolstered by this reductive documentary which claims to give a ‘once very insular community’ the opportunity ‘to open up and speak for themselves’.  Instead, in broadcasting My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding Chief Executives, eager to boost their dishevelled ratings, are effortlessly handing racially prejudiced people fresh ammunition.