Classed Femininity,Performativity,and Camp in British Structured Reality Programming

Regional Representations in Structured Reality

TOWIE follows the friendship and relationship dramas of a group of twenty-something champagne-drinking, club-going glamor models, beauticians, and entrepreneurs living in Brentwood, an upscale town in the southeastern county of Essex, England. Part of London’s commuter belt, the county features a diverse citizenship, located in wealthy enclaves and struggling working-class towns. Its cultural representations are informed by the postwar development of the region and more recent shifts in population. The stereotype of the “Basildon Man” or “Essex Man” was coined in the 1980s to refer to the Thatcherite aspirational working class—East End Londoners who moved out to Essex after benefiting from economic growth (May 2010, 11). Thus, the county is culturally coded with both East End legacies of the working class and aspirational “new money”—an often self-made new middle class viewed as lacking in culturally ratified taste codes (Walkerdine et al. 2001).

Bev Skeggs notes that representations of Essex are dominated by regional working-class stereotypes, with class often unspoken yet clearly geographically coded (2003, 112). This characterization is compounded by reality TV, where the “twenty-thirty something white ‘Essex’ girl or boy” has become one of the staple casting “types” (Biressi and Nunn 2005, 151). In much the same way that Jersey Shore (2009) employs certain stereotypes of New Jersey inhabitants (Kraszewski 2010), TOWIE draws on cultural discourses that stereotype Essex girls as dim-witted and sexualized and Essex boys as loud and flashy. Although TOWIE’s men offer variants on the Essex archetype of masculinity—focused on their appearance, consumption, and status, yet at times surprisingly emotional—for efficiency of argument, this article will focus its gender-based analysis on issues of femininity.

TOWIE was a huge success for British youth-focused digital channel ITV2, winning the BAFTA audience award in 2011 and by its third season was attracting1.7 million viewers and a 10 percent audience share—a significant achievement for a nonterrestrial channel (Plunkett 2011). This prompted other channels to develop their own structured reality programs, including fellow digital youth channel E4’s Made in Chelsea (2011). ¹ While also following the interpersonal dramas of a group of twenty-somethings, the focus here was on the wealthy upper-class London neighborhood of Chelsea. Socialites and heirs with double-barrel surnames replace club singers and aspiring footballer’s wives, offering an aspirational glimpse of a privileged lifestyle and using imagery of “heritage” London to distinguish itself from its Essex-set competitor.

Where TOWIE drew on the image of the Essex girl, Made in Chelsea (2011) drew on the similarly—though not as problematically—stereotyped figure of the ostentatiously wealthy young Sloane. Often depicted in mocking terms in popular culture as “airheaded, braying, conceited, absurd” (Deacon 2011, 19), the term is linked to residents of Sloane Square and the surrounding London neighborhoods of Chelsea and Knightsbridge and was popularized in the 1980s by Peter York’s Sloane Ranger Handbook (York and Barr 1982). The Sloane archetype has experienced a revival in recent years connected with the lifestyle of the young royals and their club-going, polo-playing social circle—the socialite as celebrity—with York producing a sequel in 2007 identifying the new breed of Sloane (York and Stewart Liberty 2007). Indeed, Made in Chelsea could be read as Kate and Pippa Middleton-informed aspirational lifestyle programming, consumed as spectacle in a time of economic downturn and a widening income gap.

Yet, the program also maintains an edge of mockery—edits and reaction shots highlight characters’ inflated sense of self-regard or foolishness—linked to cultural distaste toward the “posh” upper classes and fed through Made in Chelsea’s (2011) status as British youth television. Glossy glamor is combined with a healthy dose of schadenfreude through the cast’s lack of intelligence and awkward performances. As Caitlin Moran notes, “These people think themselves better than the Essex chavs in their sister show . . . but they’re just as dim, deluded, facile, self-serving and attention-seeking as their supposed inferiors” (2011, 17). In discussing working-class celebrity—whose representations echo through TOWIE—Biressi and Nunn suggest that the appeal of celebrities lies in their “disconnection from traditional structures of influence (inheritance, education and so forth)” (2005, 145). The Made in Chelsea cast is born into this privilege and influence—which the program luxuriates in while simultaneously undercutting—and thus lack the populist appeal of TOWIE, whose lifestyles have different class connotations, as I will demonstrate. E4’s reputation for edgy British drama and comedy together with its youthful, slightly subversive channel identity means it would be unlikely to develop a drama series offering a purely aspirational or sympathetic depiction of wealthy British society (such representations are rarely present in U.K. television outside of period drama). Made in Chelsea allows E4 to display the glamor and wealth found in its U.S. teen TV imports, yet extend the mockery and suspicion with which the channel’s middle- and working-class British youth drama’s like Skins (2007) and Misfits (2009) treat upper-class outsiders.

Tonal Shifts and Self-Awareness: Reworking Docusoap for the Big Brother Generation

Despite their class differences—which I explore in detail in this article through these programs’ divergent representations of femininity—TOWIE and Made in Chelsea (2011) share a fundamental self-awareness (though more prominent in the former) that recognizes their audience’s reality TV literacy. This is programming that internalizes the pleasurable viewing practice Annette Hill (2002, 324) identifies in Big Brother (2000–2010), the search for moments of authenticity when real people are really themselves in a constructed environment. However, structured reality demonstrates a shift in the form; pitched as “Big Brother without walls” (Tony Wood, quoted in Frost 2011), it offers a level of construction within a real-world environment. TOWIE production company Lime Pictures distinguishes the form from “fly on the wall” reality TV, as here “producers set up dramatic scenarios which are then filmed” (legal documents quoted in Khalsa 2012, 1). ² Combining docusoap’s crisis structure (Bruzzi 2006, 128) with soap opera plotting, producers structure cast meetings and plan events that prompt conflict from cast members’ existing interpersonal problems, heightening the everyday into melodrama. Thus, demonstrating reality TV’s undermining of “discursive distinctions between reality and fiction, private and public identities, authenticity and performance” (Kavka 2012, 77).

British structured reality employs a soap-like combination of relationship-based serialized storytelling, comic patter, and emotional realism, using production teams with backgrounds in British soap opera. Mimicking the combination of cinematic aesthetics and soap opera-esque storytelling found in The Hills (2006–2010), it shifts away from a documentary gaze toward a dramatic look. Unlike conventional docusoaps, the presence of the camera is never addressed within the diegesis, with interviews and talking head confessionals replacing expositional conversation and coincidental meetings. However, compared with the relatively artful naturalism of The Hills’ Lauren Conrad the British programs’ nonprofessional performers often demonstrate an awkwardness and performativity. They are not skilled and smooth enough to be read as pure drama, their stilted lack of “naturalness” in turn denying observational documentary’s fiction of real-life unfolding without intervention. Thus, structured reality offers an interweaving of performativity and soap-like emotional realism, construction, and transparency. Yet in shifting docusoap closer to fictional storytelling, tension is created between the glossy “drama” aesthetic and the British casts’ inability to convincingly perform their everyday life. This tension creates a tone of cringing comedy familiar from British sitcoms, disrupting the emotional investment encouraged by the melodramatic content and offering the British youth television audience a detached viewing position that flatters their genre literacy—their awareness of reality TV’s construction.

Where the Los Angeles set, The Hills (2006–2010) sought to connect itself with Hollywood through the use of a glossy “cinematic” style and continuity editing—an aesthetic taken up by Made in Chelsea (2011) to signify its cast’s elite status—TOWIE signals its British difference in its bright flat lighting scheme, colorful aesthetic, and liberal use of pop music montage, reminiscent of Channel 4’s youth soap Hollyoaks (1995). Yet, its play with artificiality and camp shifts the program away from British soap opera’s traditional ties with social realism, aligning it with youth television’s self-consciousness. I draw here on Susan Sontag’s (1967) discussion of camp as sharing a delight in artifice and play, a refusal of seriousness yet having the potential for tenderness. Compared with The Hills’ tendency toward earnest melodrama, TOWIE’s play with camp frames the program as possessing an underlying reflexivity, which lends its potentially problematic classed representations a tongue-in-cheek nature.

Channel Identity and Distinguishing Difference

Structured reality’s combination of reality TV and soap opera provides an economical format for the low budgets of digital channels, offering long-form, melodrama-led storytelling at a fraction of the cost of a soap or original youth drama. Like evening soaps, these programs help define their channel’s identity, with TOWIE’s success asserting ITV2’s brand as brightly-colored, gossipy and feminine, fascinated with celebrity culture. TOWIE’s representations and youth audience mark it as a successor to the celebrity docusoaps that helped define ITV2’s emerging identity in the late 2000s, particularly those featuring ex-glamor model Katie Price, a staple of tabloid newspaper and gossip magazines. ³ Offering a younger, cheaper version of terrestrial sister channel ITV’s commercial populist voice, ITV2 is populated by celebrity docusoaps, companion shows to ITV1’s blockbuster talent searches and chaotic panel show Celebrity Juice (2008; anchored by campily lascivious comic character Keith Lemon, whose persona has strong connections with TOWIE’s pleasure in artificiality). Targeting a slightly more middle-class audience than ITV2, E4 draws on Channel 4’s reputation for innovation, edginess, and Quality TV, constructing a cheeky identity that combines investment and ironic distance. The glossily aspirational Made in Chelsea (2011), with its hint of schadenfreude, slips easily into E4’s mixture of glamorous U.S. teen TV, edgy British youth dramas, and its snarkily toned continuity announcers and reality TV.

The similarities yet differences in ITV2 and E4’s characteristic tonal address and presumed demographics are highlighted by the divergent aesthetics of their flagship structured reality programs, which also work to articulate the programs’ class divisions. As noted above, TOWIE favors a bright lighting scheme and color palette, maintaining a bouncing pace through its up-tempo pop soundtrack (the program’s title a pun on 1980s British dance hit “The Only Way is Up”). Its title sequence and on-screen banners feature profusions of sparkling crystals, which reference both the cast’s fondness for ostentatious accessories and the crystals used in the infamous bikini-line bejeweling practice of “vajazzling,” practiced by the breakout star of Season 1, Amy Childs, a giggling pink-clad beautician and “wannabe” glamor model. The promotion of TOWIE’s second season centered round a music video that positioned the cast in a stylized fantasy of glamorous nightlife, drinking champagne and partying, dressed to excess in sharp suits and tight dresses. Each cast member performatively pouts and primps for the camera in a series of close-ups on a neon-lit dance floor, with the program’s title revealed emblazoned on an anonymous high-heeled woman’s bikini briefs. The promo positioned the cast as glamorous partygoers, offering an aspirational lifestyle based around excess and its women’s constructed femininities (big hair, prominent cleavage, fake tans, and nails), while offering a hint of sexuality.

As Season 2 of TOWIE drew to a close in May 2011, Made in Chelsea’s marketing campaign sought to distinguish the newcomer from its predecessor, highlighting the cast’s aloof privilege. Commercials featured a series of beautifully shot single and group portraits of the cast—echoing Annie Leibovitz’s group shot Vanity Fair covers—in evening gowns, suits and tweeds, posed on antiques in a sedate wood paneled room. Made in Chelsea (2011) aligned itself with The Hills’s (2006–2010) aspirational Hollywood fantasy, using classed aesthetic markers to position itself as both successor to and foil for TOWIE. It distanced itself from TOWIE’s fondness for a camp, tongue-in-cheek artificiality by favored a glossy, soft-toned aesthetic and carefully balanced compositions, dwelling languorously on tear-filled eyes and judgmental looks, with lingering silent close-ups closing scenes (Figure 1). Characters are framed in wide-screen, picked out against hazily focused backgrounds (Klein 2011), using a golden light that echoes the “painterly glow” found in Laguna Beach (2004–2006) and The Hills (McCarthy 2004). These are Britain’s golden youth, shielded from life by parental wealth; honey-toned blondes and glossy brunettes who ostentatiously sport furs and pricey designer handbags.

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Figure 1.

Made in Chelsea’s Caggie contemplates her romantic entanglements in a lingering close-up.

While TOWIE situates itself within the brightly light nightclubs and beauty salons of Brentwood with its anonymous high street and new-build housing, Made in Chelsea’s (2011) cast members sip champagne or tea at a parade of high-class London bars and restaurants, with key confrontations occurring at balls, country shooting weekends, and polo matches. Scenes are framed by short montages featuring shots of designer shops and iconic “heritage” London locations, together with the street signs and Georgian architecture of the Royal boroughs of Kensington and Chelsea—placing the action within a defined region and classed space.

Classed Femininities and the Operation of Aspiration and Distaste

Bev Skeggs argues that femininity is distinctly classed, as appearance and conduct act as markers of respectability. The appearance of naturalness has a higher cultural value than artifice, as the latter’s display of labor is “de-valued for being made visible” (2003, 101). The glamor displayed by the women of Made in Chelsea (2011) offers a pose of studied effortlessness, the labor needed to maintain it is hidden. The majority of cast members display expensively cut yet artfully disheveled hair, carefully applied yet subtle makeup, “natural” tans and discrete cleavage. This ideology of “naturalness” seeks to present them as both normalized, yet elite—the audience are well aware of the money needed to maintain it, the furs tell us that. This glossy “effortless” femininity is thrown into relief by the few cast members who do not conform to the model, often disruptive outsiders like Gabrielle, Ollie’s girlfriend and later antagonist, who is an aspiring pop star and notably the only member of the privately educated cast to go to state school. ⁴ Gabrielle displays a more explicitly constructed and thus “vulgar” femininity: her fake tan in tones of orange, dark makeup, and large amount of bare skin offers an imagery of artificiality more familiar in the world of TOWIE.

The narrative of Made in Chelsea’s first season is structured by a series of love triangles connected to Caggie Dunlop, who fits smoothly into the program’s aspirational aesthetic and whose wide-eyed pouting stares, soft tan, and glossy blonde hair strongly recall The Hills’ (2006–2010) Lauren Conrad (Figure 1). Yet, the most popular cast members were the supporting trio of Ollie, Binky, and Cheska, who while still upper class are outsiders to Caggie’s central group. All three sport heavy eye makeup (with Ollie at times wearing more makeup than the women), an often unrefined fashion sense and a tendency toward camp squeals, flamboyant gestures, and a pose of wide-eyed cluelessness. Binky and Cheska’s aesthetic is smirkingly critiqued by the more conventionally tasteful Amber and Rosie in the opening episode, helping to establish the social dynamics of the cast (Made in Chelsea 2011). Their fake tan dismissed as “possibly the most offensive thing in the world” and the distinction that the women’s tans and short dresses are “just not my style” serving to silently articulate Amber and Rosie’s belief in their higher social rank. They communicate their own status through their carefully low key yet moneyed style and their studiedly “natural” yet expensively maintained beauty. The unspoken levels of status within Made in Chelsea’s upper-class society demonstrate Skeggs’ (2003) argument that class is articulated through cultural practices as much as economics. Despite Ollie, Binky, and Cheska’s country cottages and flats in pristine Georgian terraces, their at times excessive appearances alongside their play with camp’s “theatricalization of experience” and its refusal of traditional seriousness (Sontag 1967, 287) distinguishes them from the other cast members; they seem more suited to Essex than Chelsea.

Bev Skeggs (2003) draws on Bourdieu to illustrate how historically, women’s bodies have been used as markers of taste cultures, noting that across a range of social and cultural representations, vulgarity and excess are coded as working class. The women of TOWIE, although financially solidly middle class, employ and celebrate a form of glamor and femininity that highlights excess and artifice and which they repeatedly define as central to their Essex identity. This “excessive” brand of glamor, although coded as vulgar by middle-class taste codes, is connected with a pleasurably display of status by its practitioners, a pride in the effort it requires.

The women of TOWIE employ a particular kind of hypersexual yet girlish femininity, one personified by Katie Price’s image that combines the princess-industrial complex (Orenstein 2011) with a pornographic aesthetic (though compared with Price’s coarseness—and despite the sexualized connotations of their appearances—the TOWIE ladies’ behavior is markedly chaste). This femininity offers a girly bling, favoring pink and crystal and is marked by an overt construction—heavy makeup, ostentatious fake tan, hair, nails, and lashes, proudly displayed fake breasts—a femininity produced through conspicuous consumption and surgery. ⁵ This postfeminist glamor is reliant on commercial beauty culture and offers a femininity that is simultaneously sexualized yet girly (Tasker and Negra 2007). Linked to the Playboy brand or glamor model (identified as an aspirational career by some of TOWIE’s women), the femininity displayed is also associated with working-class celebrities, such as Price, Kerry Katona, or Jade Goody. Staples of tabloids and gossip magazines, these women have been derided by certain sections of the press and society as “celebrity chavs” for their lack of education and middle-class taste codes.

Class Distinctions and “Chav” Femininity

These women’s celebrity is built on a certain kind of working-class girl made good, ⁶ succeeding despite many hard knocks and copious press criticism (Tyler and Bennett 2010). ITV2’s celebrity docusoaps showcased both Price and Katona as they balanced celebrity life with the struggles of relationships and family, their narratives articulating the women’s ordinary-yet-extraordinary celebrity identity (Holmes 2005, 34). When Price left ITV2 in 2010 for a multimillion pound deal with satellite channel Sky Living, TOWIE’s success helped fill the commercial and representational gap she left behind. Replacing celebrities with “ordinary” people, the program spectacularized its cast’s daily life, targeting a primarily female demographic with a mixture of hyperglamor—their celebrity-inspired femininities—and the everyday—their mundane Essex surroundings—familiar from representations of the “celebrity chav.”

Imogen Tyler and Bruce Bennett characterize chav as a derogatory term labeling a “young, white, working class as lazy, tasteless, unintelligent, or criminal” (2010, 379). Often achieving fame through reality TV, the “celebrity chav” is a primarily female, formerly working-class celebrity judged (by the press or public) as unworthy of her wealth or success and chastised for her inability to perform the “correct” femininity, one associated with middle- and upper-class glamor and refinement (Tyler and Bennett 2010, 381; by contrast, pop star Cheryl Cole has managed to shed her celebrity chav image through her assimilation of these taste codes and careful performance of vulnerability). The cultural discourse surrounding the women of TOWIE draws on similar ideologies as despite their middle-class status achieved by their socially mobile Essex parents (Walkerdine et al. 2001 chronicle this working-class shift in the 1980s) their overtly constructed femininities still read as working class. This—along with their lack of language skills and general knowledge—can lead to observers coding them as “chavs.”

Arguably the term chav demonstrates a shift in tonality from the working-class “Essex girl”—a badge often worn with pride by the women of TOWIE. She may be the butt of class and gender-based mockery but the “Essex girl” is rarely subjected to the vitriol thrown at the “chav.” The coding of the TOWIE cast as “chavs” is found in online discussions and broadsheet press discourse—illustrating the role of middle-class taste distinctions in cultural monitoring. The Telegraph argued that “the dismally moronic” program contributed to Essex’s “chav-stained public image” (Christiansen 2011, 30), whereas the Observer used TOWIE as its case study of televisual representations of “chavs,” suggested that the program’s success comes at the expense of images of the “respectable working class” (Cadwalladr 2011). Judgments of taste dominate these discussions, with The Times’s Caitlin Moran suggesting the cast were offered up as “the very worst of the working classes making good” (2011, 17), whereas Owen Jones argued in the Independent that the program “caricatures the supposedly ‘tacky aspirational’ working-class who can’t spend money with the taste and discretion of the middle class” (2011, 4). British structured reality illustrates the intricate coding of the British class systems around “taste” and “style,” and the distinctions made between “old” and “new” money by the middle classes (Walkerdine et al. 2001, 43).

Destigmatizing Excessive Femininities

In characterizing the TOWIE cast as tacky and tasteless, this press discourse echoes critiques of the chav’s “excessive consumption of consumer and branded goods” and “‘bad,’ ‘vulgar’ and excessive consumer choices” (Tyler 2008, 21). Postfeminist discourse positions contemporary femininity as inextricably intertwined with consumer culture (Tasker and Negra 2007); however, TOWIE represents a femininity constructed through “excessive” consumption. Yet, the program’s focus on “glitz” in its femininities and aesthetic exhibits a playful defiance of “respectable” taste connected with the “class cross-dressing” of the working-class celebrity, where “sartorial and material signifiers of class transformation mark both working class origins and the move away from them” (Biressi and Nunn 2005, 145–46). The cast’s valuing of artifice and the demonstrable effort involved in their appearance connects them to working-class femininity despite their generational remove.

This rejection of middle-class taste codes and foregrounding of artifice—combined with the program’s knowing tone and awkward performances—can encourage a mocking audience position that pokes fun at its cast’s inarticulate excess. However, TOWIE’s infusion of its narrative and aesthetic with a tongue-in-cheek camp suggests that structured reality offers multiple access points for viewers beyond derogatory mockery. In centralizing camp’s “love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration” (Sontag 1967, 275), the program positions its performances and excessive femininities as knowingly comic. By framing its excesses through this knowing tonal address, it seeks to defuse potential charges of negative stereotyping—though some question whether the cast demonstrates enough self-awareness to avoid exploitative caricaturing (Raeside and Flynn 2011).

The cast’s giggling pride in their unnatural and artificial femininity contributes to this camp tone, as it enacts a knowing performativity. Whereas the 1990s docusoap subject was required both to retain their ordinariness and to perform it (Kavka 2012, 70), the nonnatural situation of the structured reality process prompts a performance that creates tension with any remnants of documentary naturalism. The process produces an image that is simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary. TOWIE’s framework of camp seeks to “naturalize” its cast’s self-conscious performativity and smooth the tensions created by imperfect performances.

Cast member Amy Childs is highly performative in her manner, drawing on camp’s favoring of the strongly exaggerated and illustrating Sontag’s argument that to “perceive camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role” (1967, 280). Like all TOWIE cast members, Amy wears full makeup and blown-out hair whether at a club, at work, or gossiping in a friend’s living room. While cast members like Lydia or Sam seek to display emotional realism despite their constructed appearance, Amy plays the role of “Amy Childs,” the celebrity she desires to be but not yet is. ⁷ At her bubblegum pink home salon, she offers a giggling pose of straight-talking airheadedness, seriously yet clumsily talking through the treatments she gives to her friends as she “performs” her role as beautician. She wears impractically high heels, her brightly dyed red hair clashing with her pink, tight-fitting uniform, which prominently displays the cleavage of her fake breasts (Figure 2). These she discusses at the beginning of Season 2 with new arrival Chloe while giving her a spray tan, having playfully set out her choice of shades through a set of swatches ranging from “oompa loompa” to “cornbeef” [sic] to “why bother,” in a self-aware commentary on the tanning excesses of herself and her community (TOWIE 2011, Episode No. 12).

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Figure 2.

TOWIE’s Amy performs her camp-tinged persona in her pink home salon.

Compared with the excessive behavior and schadenfreude associated with MTV’s Jersey Shore (Klein 2011), TOWIE’s “unrefined” and larger-than-life glamor is played for gentle comedy, particularly when positioned within the everyday locales of suburban or rural Essex. Fake tanned, plump-lipped Chloe is displayed in wide shots while sitting knock-kneed on her lounge’s small chintzy sofa with her cousin Joey Essex, their dinner balanced on lap trays. The cozy daytime domesticity is at odds with the glamorous excess of her heavy eye makeup, sky high heels, tight dress and fake nails (TOWIE 2011, Episode No. 22). When Amy and her friends go “glamping” (glamorous camping), comedy is derived from the sight of their constructed aesthetic set against the natural beauty of the Essex countryside—as Sontag notes, “nothing in nature can be campy” (1967, 279). As the women attempt to put up their boldly colored gazebo, Amy is framed in wide shots against the sun-dappled green fields as she feigns ignorance and performatively pouts at the task. The juxtaposition of the natural landscape with her bright blue puffed-skirt party dress paired with Ugg boots and chandelier earrings signals her appearance as comically inappropriate and excessive (TOWIE 2011, Episode No. 21).

This juxtaposition of the women’s heightened, fake, glamor with everyday British locales helps to position TOWIE within national and generational television sensibilities. British youth television often sustains a cheeky skepticism alongside a pose of ironic detachment. This is most clearly seen in continuity announcers and presenters mocking and occasionally deconstructing the overearnest melodrama or utopian aspects of U.S. teen TV imports, such as The O.C. (2003–2007) and One Tree Hill (2003–2012; Woods forthcoming). Thus, TOWIE’s knowing sensibility, its recognition of its distance from naturalism—camp’s “theatricalization of experience” and its refusal of traditional seriousness (Sontag 1967, 287)—positions it within the skepticism of British youth television.

This use of irony and camp to negotiate the tensions between construction and emotional realism mirrors the address Su Holmes identifies in British gossip magazine heat, which shares structured reality’s youth demographic. Offering representations that echo the celebrities who grace the pages of the magazine, these programs—particularly TOWIE—act as an adjunct to celebrity culture, producing new content and subjects for this discourse. ⁸ Holmes (2005, 36) suggests that heat’s irreverent and ironic address acknowledges the fabrication of celebrity culture, but in the process, works to smooth over the magazine and reader’s involvement in this process. TOWIE takes up this address, foregrounding the awkwardness of its construction and artificiality of its femininities through its framework of comic camp. The program’s knowing address seeks to smooth over its potentially problematic representations.

This allows the program to flatter its audience, recognizing their genre literacy, and offering a comfortable position of at times derisory detachment—the cast’s femininities are artificial and inauthentic, so the program’s artificial nature is accepted. Yet, it also offers an engaged investment through the soap-like emotional realism of its interpersonal drama—the real tears behind the fake eyelashes—opening the program up to a range of readings, at times maintained simultaneously. Structured reality thus both draws on the knowing address of heat and demonstrates the oscillation between a detached “cynicism” and engaged “enchantment” that characterizes British youth television (Lury 2001). This ironic address and textual consciousness, a play “between investment and alienation, between an outsider’s distaste and detachment and the insider’s investment and knowledge” (Lury 2001, 42) is the default viewing position of British youth television, with structured reality engineered for this audience.

“Set Up Purely for Your Entertainment”: Artifice, Play, and Performance

Structured reality treads a delicate line, drawing its audience in with interpersonal drama and soap-like emotional realism, yet distancing them with awkward performances and evident construction. Richard Dyer argues that camp demystifies by playing up artifice (2002, 52) and TOWIE’s knowing performativity and awkwardness works to “demystify” the documentary fiction of real-life unfolding without intervention. It recognizes audience assumptions that “stories in reality programs are exaggerated or made up in order to make interesting television,” and that “ordinary people cannot help but perform once cameras are rolling” (Hill 2005, 66).

TOWIE’s playful construction is signaled by its framing device, as each episode opens with a disclaimer stating that scenes have been created for entertainment purposes: the consequence of famous cases of “faked” footage in late 1990s British television documentaries (discussed by Winston 2011). TOWIE offers the required acknowledgment of construction with a tongue-in-cheek humor that signals the program’s tonal address. Presented in glittering text as part of the titles and read in voice-over by Essex-born actress and presenter Denise Van Outen, each episode’s disclaimer offers a variation on “this programme contains flash cars, big watches and some bare-faced cheek. The tans you see might be fake, but the people are all real although some of what they do has been set up purely for your entertainment” (TOWIE 2011, Episode No. 22). Thus, TOWIE itself connects the construction involved in both the cast’s appearance and the program’s depiction of their lives, yet claims that despite their constructed aesthetic, their essence is “real,” and they offer emotional realism.

Richard Kilborn has noted that many British docusoaps speak to their audience in a knowing manner, principally through narrative style and mode of address (2003, 108). British audience are accustomed to a jauntily mocking voice-over, absolving them of the “shame” of watching reality TV (Kavka 2008). Drawing on her star persona as glamorous yet cheekily down to earth “Essex girl” Denise Van Outen’s performative presentation of the disclaimer simultaneously sets out the program’s knowing tone and signals its disruption of documentary’s “truth claims.” This thus illustrates Kavka’s argument that “rather than erasing the division between mediation and reality, television programming has been foregrounding its modes of mediation and hence teaching viewers to be savvy about its status as cultural and technical construction” (2008, 5).

In contrast Made in Chelsea’s (2011) disclaimer is offered by the continuity announcer and thus remains wholly outside the text, leaving the program’s diegesis intact and signaling a lack of TOWIE’s explicit knowingness. A more textually present disclaimer would be at odds with Made in Chelsea’s glamorously escapist lifestyles and smooth “quality” aesthetic. However, the disclaimer still cues the audience to read the performances and storylines through a skeptical gaze, encouraging the search for moments of inauthenticity and construction that structured reality embraces. In addition, a hint of mockery is present in the quotes from cast members who operate as episode titles. Displayed after the logo—whose font and shining crown references the ubiquitous “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster and its connotations of stiff-upper-lipped British tradition—these can signal the episode’s narrative trajectory. However, they often also showcase a foolish or pretentious remark, contrasting with the refined connotations of the logo and the aesthetic that follows, working to undercut the cast’s elite status from the outset.

Although the glossy aesthetic of Made in Chelsea (2011) allows the audience to luxuriate in the cast’s wealthy lifestyles, it undercuts their superiority through a strong strand of class schadenfreude. The golden light and backdrop of wealth along with the construction of melodramatic set pieces at elaborate parties or balls works to align the program with the glossy glamor of E4’s U.S. teen TV imports, such as The O.C. (2003–2007) and 90210 (2008). Yet, this escapism is problematized by the undercurrent of mockery produced through edits that heighten inane comments, awkward pauses, cast-members willful lack of self-knowledge, and their artless performances of self.

While the women of TOWIE are innately performative, Made in Chelsea’s (2011) heirs and socialites were initially more self-conscious (though as the series progressed, some relaxed into their roles and their performativity increased). Their tentativeness and initial lack of performativity appeared as an attempt to maintain a class-based aloofness over the project itself, a desire to retain dignity and power over their reality TV representation. Yet, the resulting performances were often stiff and awkward, the cast too self-conscious to embrace the “playful, anti-serious” nature of TOWIE’s camp (Sontag 1967, 288). TOWIE seems to revel in its cast’s slightly stilted performances of their everyday life as this serves its camp tone in the same way as its women’s artificial femininities do—working to highlight the program’s lack of naturalness. In contrast, Made in Chelsea’s stilted performances clash with the cast’s otherwise glamorously refined femininities and the program’s artful and smooth aesthetic to uncomfortable effect: their studiedly “natural” femininities undermined by their unnatural performances of ordinary life.

This ultimately punctures the program’s aspirational glamor, the tension created between the flawless setting and the cast’s awkwardness working to feed the audience’s sense of class schadenfreude. The cast’s elitist position is undercut and their pretension exposed by an inability to convincingly perform their own lives. Although British structured reality may mimic the glossy, dramatic look of The Hills (2006–2010), the awkwardness and artificiality of some of its performances highlights the transformation of the form in a national context. Structured reality seems uninterested in smoothing out the rough edges of its cast’s performances; this perhaps is its clearest contribution to a camp sensibility: “It’s good because it’s awful” (Sontag 1967, 292).

Conclusion

TOWIE and Made in Chelsea (2011) appropriate The Hills’ (2006–2010) blurring of drama and reality TV, yet they glocalize the U.S. form to fit within the skeptical tonal address of British youth television. I suggest that this programming assimilates the MTV form’s melodramatic storytelling and aspirational consumption-oriented lifestyles into British television by acknowledging the construction and artificiality that The Hills often sought to obscure. Their self-aware tone, pleasure in awkwardness, and performative play suggested the impossibility of docusoap’s observational “authenticity.” Structured reality simultaneously deploys soap opera storytelling and emotional realism while recognizing the innate artificiality and construction of reality TV, highlighting the complex audience engagement offered by the form.

By focusing on issues of representation, I have demonstrated how TOWIE and Made in Chelsea (2011) continue reality TV’s fascination with class (Wood and Skeggs 2011). The hyperawareness of class in TOWIE and Made in Chelsea articulates the role of classed hierarchies within British society, fed through aesthetic distinctions and femininities. Their celebration of excess tilts toward caricature, yet they seek to defuse their problematic representations by employing a knowing tonal address and camp performativity. The pose of ironic detachment encouraged by British youth television means the programs use culturally divisive representations yet frame them as untroublingly comedic through their camp play and class-based schadenfreude. Although illustrating the multiple viewing positions offered by cynically enchanted British youth television, these programs demonstrate the centrality of class and construction to the pleasures of contemporary British reality TV.