My big fat advertising cock up – C4 cross the line

Channel 4 are laughing at gypsies in the name of documentary, says Tillie Cox, and their advertising campaign is about as David Attenborough as Big Brother.

“BIGGER. FATTER. GYPSIER.” roars a gargantuan advertising board near the ever-frantic Old Street roundabout in east London. The face of a young boy stares defiantly out from behind the text, his eyes narrowed. Is he angry? Or just squinting into the lens? The aggressive capitals decide for you.

Channel 4, who created the multimillion-pound point-and-laugh franchise of Big Brother, has once again struck gold. In the name of social documentary, Gypsies are propelled into the media spotlight, hoping that the world will see the ‘real’ them. The world runs off giggling at the cartoonish figures the TV people created in the cutting room. Television is once again the bitchy older pupil who befriends the outcast in order to mock them. And mock they have.

The hugely successful My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding television show is now in its second series, having started life as a one-off program documenting the lives of Romany gypsies and Irish Travellers in the UK today. Calling it a documentary is troubling, though, as a group that had been notoriously private has now been given a public image based on a few isolated examples.

The show is full of clips, often of young children, saying things that will shock, that will elicit a response from the majority of viewers who will be appalled at young girls routinely using sunbeds, and wearing expensive dresses so heavy that they cause pain. By reducing a whole race of people to pink wedding dresses and orange skin, they are exposing them to mockery, to further ostracism and bullying. “Gypsier” only underlines the hyperbole, the hysteria with which the show toys.

In his brilliant book Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, Owen Jones muses on the fact that the middle classes, so ardent in their opposition to homophobia and racism, think nothing of joking about “chavs”. The notion of the working classes as feral, lazy and as the “other” has become socially acceptable; a means of justifying the widening gap between “us” and “them”.

In depicting menacing boys and sexualised girls, Channel 4 tap into this middle class panic. Gypsies are a race, not a class, but they are still the societal other, and the same weapons are used against them: trivialization, a reduction to the absurd. Feminists may deplore the fact that women are generally expected to give up work after marriage – and spend their lives cooking, cleaning and having children – but without showing these people respect, how can we expect to have a dialogue with them?

Channel 4 argue that everyone in the campaign has seen and approved the images used, but they don’t seem to have considered the other communities that are inevitably damaged by association with this snide approach. This defence echoes the line The Sun uses to justify the sexualisation of women on page 3: the implications for the wider group being represented are never considered.

The London Gypsy and Traveller Unit has written an open letter to Channel 4’s head office objecting to the advertising. Channel 4 has responded saying the term “Gypsier” is not used in a negative context. Negative? Perhaps not, but it is provocative advertising, and hardly the language of “documentary”. There is no My Big Fat Arctic Expedition in David Attenborough’s pipeline, that I am aware of.