The Kids Aren’t Alright: Nepotism in the Modern Media by Nick Bryans
Family Fortune
Nepotism is just about as British a quality as there is. If you think of the stereotypical hallmarks of British culture, you think of red phone boxes, Bobbies on the beat, taking breaks in sport for a cup of tea, The Archers and Nepotism. We have a Royal Family. We have a class system. Our whole society is set up in such a way that the standard of your life will almost certainly depend on who you were lucky (or unlucky) enough to be born to.
The media is one area that has been touched by the big oily cock of nepotism. The public responses to spoilt children getting an undeserved leg-up in the industry have ranged from searing outrage to ‘…meh. It’s live at Studio Five. The exhumed corpses of Hitler and Stalin could present it and it would still be pretty fucking trite’.
The traits of someone who has got a position due to their name rather than ability tend to be blindingly obvious. It’s a bit like when as a child you return home with a stick man drawing or a potato-prints picture, and your parent puts it on the fridge to keep you happy. Only instead of the fridge, it’s the Tate Modern (though one should add, If Damien Hirst put some potato prints in an art gallery, no doubt you’d get some hipster berks in Hampstead claiming the this was a conceptual study in the organic nature of art, and how its formation has been changed by the technological impact on art and artists. And then their beret would fall off…).
When children of the famous get work in low-end publications and broadcasters, the response is more ridicule than outrage. Chloe Madely dropped out of University after one term to pursue a career in media. She stated that:
“I left Leeds University after a term because I was just so over the whole education thing.”
Which, you know, are the usual phrases to appear in the patois of hard-working, budding media personalities. After stints on Big
"We always knew our child had a gift"
Brother’s Big Mouth, Live at Studio Five and – quelle surprise! – The Richard and Judy Show, Chole had the nepotism stick wagged firmly at her, but she claimed that she had the talent to make it on her own. To prove this to dissidents nationwide, she felt the best way to get herself across as a credible broadcaster was to strip for FHM, and appear on shows such as Celebrity Quitters (A show were ‘celebrities’ give up smoking) and Dancing On Ice (A show where celebrities dance……on ice). Hmm….
Then you have Georgina Littlejohn. Son of Richard ‘spawn of Satan’ Littlejohn, she was vilified by critics due to her appallingly down-market writing, with pieces such as ‘Make-up free Lucy Davis looks tired and fed up’ and ‘Winehouse shows signs of overindulgence as she lets it all hang out by the pool’, a story about Amy Winehouse looking a bit fat, which contained possibly the finest sentence in the history of the printed press;
She might be drug-free, but Amy still succumbs to Mr Niccotine – ironically, an appetite suppressant
(note – she did indeed spell Nicotine wrong)
The thing with Madeley and Littlejohn is that, though it’s wrong that they have a very basic grasp of spelling and sentence structure and yet get given prominent media jobs, it’s not like they’re doing stuff to make people envious. If it’s not these two doing banal reality TV or sniping celebrity columns, it’ll be two other dribbling tosspots, just sans rich parent.
This is my 'Serious Journalism' corset
However, it’s the children of the affluent who have gained exposure through credible outlets that have faced the most intense public scorn. A famous example which saw the Guardian draw widespread criticism was Max Gogarty’s ‘Max, 21, hits the road’, a self-penned article in the Guardian’s travel column by some utterly repulsive hipster twat who was going to document his ‘gap yah’ in India, where particularly highlights were to be;
Debauched beach parties, the dodgy days with “washing machine” tummy, the messy late-night stumblings into bars and, of course, all that bullshit about finding myself.
Now I speak for everyone when I say that, if I want to watch some odious British tourist get pissed on a foreign beach, I’ll pop on ‘Sun, Sea, and A + E’.
The Gogarty article read like a pure satire, like it was a typical pastiche of the ‘Shoreditch Twat’, or the pitch for a Nathan Barley movie. Every single sentence made you want to punch a wall;
Spending any sort of money I earn on food and skinny jeans, and drinking my way to a financially blighted two-month trip to India and Thailand. Clichéd I know, but clichés are there for a reason.
Are they? Really, Max. Are they?
Some of turns of phrase would make you utterly wince with their deplorable lack of self-awareness.
I’m kinda shitting myself about travelling. Well not so much the travelling part. It’s India that scares me. The heat, the roads, the snakes, Australian travellers. Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited. But shitting myself.
So a heady mix of racism, xenophobia and scat humour there. It’s what I look for in my daily Guardian.
Suspicious were raised over how someone with this standard of writing could get a column in the Guardian, and then proceed to piss off the entire country in a few short paragraphs. It transpired that Max’s father Paul was a travel writer for them, which caused uproar amongst the internet community.
Despite an editor’s rebuffing that he got the gig due to him contributing script to the TV show Skins, the general consensus is that saying he ‘wrote’ for Skins just made poor Max’s case worse. His blog was pulled and he never wrote for the Guardian again.
However bad Max Gogarty’s writing may have been, never will you read a worse column that this piece in magazine ‘NYLON’ by everyone’s favourite ubiquitous daughter; Miss Peaches Honeyblossom Geldof.
'Yah, I just needed to find myself. As did Biffo and Wills. Those 2-4-1 drinks deals helped.'
Peaches Geldof left independent Queens College, London, with a U in Politics. Though her painfully shit level of education would leave most people cleaning out bins for a living, it was enough to secure her columns in Elle Girl, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, ES Magazine and Cleo Australia. It must been a really strong U. Like on the U/F boundary. However, Peaches’ ‘Pièce de résistance’ was an article she wrote for NYLON magazine in 2008 (I should add, ‘critically acclaimed’ NYLON magazine).
Now before I start spouting hyperbole everywhere , I should add some perspective; I’ve read Liz Jones, Jan Moir, Quentin Letts, Sally Bercow, Max Gogarty, Binkie West, Richard Littlejohn, Peter Hitchens, Sarah Palin, ex-girlfriends’ glossy magazines, birthday cards from 4-year old nephews, the back of toothpaste packets on the toilet, The Da Vinci Code and Nuts magazine’s ‘women’s sex confessions’; and yet even with all this competition, Peaches Geldof’s ‘British Invasion’ column in NYLON magazine is the worst thing I have ever read.
Never has a column made me feel as misanthropic as this. At least when reading Littlejohn, you know that he’s a prick that provides shocks for laughs. But with this article, you could only assume that Peaches was sitting there writing putrid metaphor after putrid metaphor, thinking ‘this is fucking gold this is. I’m like a modern day Sylvia Plath’. Opening with the most vomit inducing sentence in the history of digital media;
The sun glows a burned orange as it sinks behind a skyscraper, a car horn screeches irritably, the wind whistles through the acres of willows in Central Park: New York, the most offbeat and eccentric city in America, is my new home.
the article just goes from bad to worse:
Her high-pitched hyena laugh filling the office as Marvin strums his guitar and dreams up ideas for the next issue. I feel like I’m part of a movement—a magazine that encapsulates everything cool and strange and interesting.
Yeah, a movement. It’s like fucking Solidarity in there. That’s all Lech Walesa did anyway; wrote in a shite magazine about the latest retro fashion to hit Krakow, and boom; workers had rights. IT’S A MOVEMENT BITCHES!
I grew up there [London], walked its cobbled streets a thousand times, and frequented its infamous haunts. The skies are always grey and the weather is freezing, but the place is alive
The cobbled streets of London? The fuck are you on about? Jesus, someone pass me the sick bag. Or just fucking shoot me in the head.
The whole article reads like a cross between a D level English GCSE paper, and a ‘my first metaphor book’. And that’s just the standard of writing, the content is even worse.
Highlights included buying a sequined flannel shirt in Colorado for a dollar off an old Mexican woman, who told me it was a family heirloom; Max purchasing a James Dean printed metal lunchbox and using it as a makeshift handbag; being chased by a homeless man wearing a Slipknot T-shirt in Iowa; going vintage shopping in a Pittsburgh store where a 10-year-old kid in a 1970s flared pantsuit and fedora sold us the entire stock of clothes for fifty bucks. (Max loved this store and later changed into an ‘80s red silk evening dress to present the American Eagle music festival in Pittsburgh, to my amusement and his Chester French bandmate’s confusion.)
Well that sounds like a swell day out. You two spongers fluttering about a charity shop, cause, like, you’re just so alterative, yeah? The whole thing could be paraphrased as ‘me and my rockstar boyfriend go clothes shopping with daddy’s money’;
The whole piece is a mess of hackneyed cliché, mawkish metaphors and garrulous language which come together to form this awful mess of an essay. Naturally, the response to the article was overwhelmingly bad. The article got 302 comments, and so much attention that it was written about it in an English paper. Like Max at the Guardian, her weekly column was scrapped, and she now only makes the odd fleeting experience where she say what tracks she thinks are JUST OMG SOOO AMAZIN RITE NOW!
The basic lesson we can learn from this, is that if you’re after a bit of attention for a gutter press column or downmarket TV tit-bit; putting a famous relative on it will get you popularity and hits. However, if you try and use a surname to get attention or as a favour to a friend in a serious journalism column, you will be utterly crucified. So maybe as a rule of thumb, for serious journalism; employ people based on their ability and experience, rather than who’s loins they were sired from.
Just a thought, like.
Visionary...Dreamweaver...Icon.
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© 2012
Nice writting Nick. You’ve not only summed up much that is wrong with the cult of celebrity, but you’ve highlighted everything that’s wrong with celebrity brats.
*writing obv. bloody k/b with ittts sticky chars.