Personal grooming

I found myself among a group of young people the other day, and they were talking with much hilarity about The Only Way Is Essex (ITV2, Sunday and Wednesday). This is cult television, adored by the generation that watches it. The show is a strange hybrid: real people play themselves under their real names, but with much of the script and many of the plots written for them. So it’s a reality show that has more or less ditched reality.

The cast are young Essex people with money. They spend their time in expensive cars, in the gym, or making themselves beautiful in salons and nail bars. Nail bars! No female would expose her real fingernails in this series any more than she would wear pants that showed off her cellulite. If it hadn’t already been liposuctioned away. Their obsessions are their looks, their cash, and their personal relationships, which they handle badly. They all have the latest mobile phones, but find it very hard to communicate.

You know how occasionally some smartie-pants director decides to set Julius Caesar in a Chicago meat-packing plant, to remind us that Shakespeare’s vision is universal and eternal. In the same weird way Essex reminds me of Jane Austen. There is the same necessarily small social group, gripped by the need to maintain prestige through money and looks, the same nagging anxiety experienced by the women — they want a man ‘who will really look after me’, which means spend money on them. Relations with the opposite sex are made almost impossible by misunderstanding — ‘does he really want me at his birthday party now that we’re not together, even though we were going out since we were at school?’ — for example.