Made in Chelsea: not so bad it's good, just bad

I have run half-marathons. I have swum length upon length in the swimming pool till I started to become one with the water like the senator in the first X-Men movie. I have even read War and Peace. But all these pale in comparison to the endurance that was necessary to make myself watch an entire episode of Made in Chelsea. By the last quarter I had to control my hand, as zombie like, it made a grab for the TV remote to watch another old episode of Mock the Week on Dave. It was that desperate.

I’d just like to say that I went into this with a completely open mind; one of my guiltiest pleasures is watching the tanned chimpanzees on Jersey Shore and The Only Way Is Essex is watchable in the ‘pass the Doritos’ car crash television genre. But Made in Chelsea isn’t even ‘so bad it’s good’. It achieves a new level of awfulness, just below the level having a major organ removed without anaesthetic. It’s about a group of people in a well-to-do area of London, and is all about their love affairs and general relationships. It claims reality but has already been exposed as a fake. Here lies its problem; it lacks the feeling that we are watching real people such as Jersey Shore (albeit exaggerated), or that it is outright caricature like The Only Way is Essex. The result is abject failure.

The show falls upon a specific line; skyline of a Chelsea apartment, close up of people talking, people become cross, people pout like Ben Stiller in Zoolander, some mediocre argument occurs and people pout some more. The people are, without exception, boring. They read their lines in a dull monotone in a way that would embarrass a class of eight year olds and what facial language they have is limited to a pout, or a slight furrowing of the eyebrows to indicate they are cross. The character ‘Francis’ is the worst; I kept expecting there to be a joke about how boring or bad a person he was at talking, but no the complete void that was Francis was just taken for granted. Then I knew Donald Sutherland felt in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. At no point did I feel the slightest empathy or worry for any person.

It’s not worth dwelling on the plot – there isn’t one. Someone has a dinner party and people run into each other and look cross, someone skis and tosses their hair, a man called Spencer who reminds me of the boss in the IT crowd without the humour tries to pretend he’s cross and walks away to sad music which cannot hide the fact the whole scene is unintentionally hilarious. It’s just set after set of glossy photoshoots that could have been in OK magazine.

Made in Chelsea had such potential for satire. The idea of puncturing this very sheltered, very insular class with all its conceits would have made for a great show. Rather than being contemptuous of these utterly insignificant dinner parties and skiing trips, it celebrates them. The whole show has little plot, less structure and is sunk by its own sense of seriousness. It seems one great in-joke about people in London – they speak quite posh you know, and spend ever so much on fashion – that falls flat. It is without doubt the worst thing currently on TV and I urge you to ignore it and let the whole show shrivel and die.

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