Patrick Freyne on Made in Chelsea, Life is Toff and How Rich Are You?

Here are some things you can learn about posh people from this week's Made in Chelsea (E4): They have names like Binky and Tiff and Proudlock and Lonan and Tyrion Lannister and Fluffy and Spot. Their skin is unusually and uniformly beige, while their heads manage to be both meaty and angular, like footballs with cheekbones. They say "Yah" a lot, and look blankly at each other in expensive restaurants.

Most don’t have real jobs. When Jeff says he worked for a hotel business in Dubai, Proudlock, who sports a top-knot and trustafarian tattoos, says, “I love hotels” because that’s the only bit of the previous sentence he understood.

Instead of working, Chelseans go clay-pigeon shooting while wearing semi-ironic tweeds or don lederhosen like German peasants for Bavarian-themed parties (let’s take a moment to remember Marie Antoinette used to dress like a shepherdess shortly before the revolution).

Tiny dogs ...
They also love tiny dogs, possibly because many of them have the types of names more usually associated with tiny dogs. Steph, an American who appeared in The Hills, gets incredibly excited by the sight of Digby, a German Spitz, cradled in her friend Lucy's arms. Steph loves, she says, that Digby never grows. Later, Jeff tries to lure Steph on a date by telling her about his bulldog puppy.

“How small is he?” asks Steph warily. “Tiny,” says Jeff, to seal the deal. Steph’s eyes widen and she begins to salivate. She can’t wait to eat that puppy.

The rich are the ideal subjects for fly-on-the-wall, scripted-reality television series. They’ve been ignoring the help for millennia, so it’s no bother to them to ignore a camera crew. Some don’t even know they’re on television; “I’m a very private person,” says Tiff. Their entire existence is a form of scripted reality anyway. Although, (political metaphor alert) in this case the script writer is international capitalism.

On Life is Toff (BBC3), the Fulford family are ruddier and more foul-mouthed than the Chelseans, but they are no less idle and rich. Thousands of years of exquisite breeding have led to the brick red patriarch Francis Fulford and his four adult offspring wandering their massive estate shouting things like, "Daddy, are we allowed to kill ducks?" and "You're not drawing a penis on me."

The Fulfords don’t care if we hate them. “If anybody turns around and tries to judge me for being in this amazing position, then frankly they can fuck off,” says Arthur Fulford, a chain-smoking accident of physics, who’s going to inherit everything his eye can see just because he emerged from an aristocratic womb 15 minutes before his twin.

"Frankly they can fuck off"
Watching the Fulford brothers water-boarding one another with rancid milk (this week they started a cheese business) should be enough to send anyone to the barricades. But the wealthy are treated, on telly, as an exotic, slightly comic holdover from olden-times, not powerful contributors to contemporary problems. They don't generate anger or get blamed, like poorer, more powerless people on shows like Benefits Street.

So on How Rich are You? (Channel 4) presenter Richard Bacon used graphs, slide-whistle sound effects and a bizarre mechanical model of the economy, to demonstrate increasing inequality and ramp up the rage. Okay, the programme wasn't quite Thomas Picketty's Capital (stop lying to yourself, you're never going to read that book) but it efficiently explained why and how social mobility has stalled. At one point two happy babies from very different backgrounds were presented, and their tragically divergent life expectations were discussed.

Soon the studio audience were on the brink of revolt. “Quite the left-wing audience tonight,” said Bacon, although after all the evidence presented, this was really just, to paraphrase Stephen Colbert, reality having a left-wing bias. In the mansions of Chelsea, Binky felt an unexpected chill.