THE BIG FAT GYPSY CONTROVERSY

“I am not after 5 minutes of fame, what I am asking for is for you to put humans above ratings.”

So ended Romany Gypsy Pip McKenzie’s open letter to Channel 4, which took issue with the broadcaster’s portrayal of the Gypsy and Traveller community in its ‘My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding’ series.

But like it or not, fame was to follow for Pip. His piece – posted on his Pipopotamus blog – quickly caught the imagination of the public, and spread across the internet like wildfire.

“I’ve never been a fan of the show as it made life really difficult for me at school,” Pip tells us. “So I decided to write a blog that put across the truth. At first, it was just to be an informative piece, but after a few unsuccessful attempts it took the form of a letter. Then it just flowed, it was all my frustration coming out.”

Pip posted the blog on the evening of Saturday 18th February; four days after Channel 4 had screened the opening episode of My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding’s second series.

Buzz from the first show, which attracted 5.7 million viewers, had now died down, save for a minor controversy surrounding the programme’s advertising campaign.

But then the letter appeared.

Gaining Momentum

Looking to dispel a number of the claim’s made during the show, Pip wrote eloquently on issues ranging from social exclusion to poverty.

He took Channel 4 to task on its insistence to always feature Irish Travellers, on its “unhealthy obsession with little girls”, and its preoccupation with the act of grabbing (“It appears that in reality, no-one actually knows what grabbing is, in fact Gypsy and Traveller men actually have a lot of respect for their women,” he writes).

The blog received 1,000 views overnight. This was impressive, but not groundbreaking for Pip – after all a previous post focusing on the Dale Farm controversy had picked up similar numbers.

But unlike previous occasions, the momentum didn’t stop. “As the day went on my phone started going crazy. Hundreds of people started tweeting me telling me how much they enjoyed my blog, and my followers were shooting up,” Pip said.

Sunday evening saw a real boost. Twitter activity reached levels that would only usually be seen when the show was actually on, while the blog edged towards (and then very quickly past) 20,000 hits.

“When my friends checked the stats I couldn’t believe it,” Pip says. “It seemed absolutely insane, but still it was going up and up.”

It was after this peak that other media came calling. Mail Online – the UK’s most popular website – ran a piece on the letter, while every other newspaper and broadcaster were all sniffing around for their own exclusive.

“When I started getting contacted by journalists I knew that this was something massive,” Pip says. “National newspapers were offering me a lot of money, while broadcasters were asking me to come on TV shows.”

This posed a dilemma. “I’m just a little old Romany boy, I don’t know anything about how to deal with the press and it was quite scary to be honest,” Pip admits.

“And while I was happy that my opinions were valued, when people started using my blog and my photos without even asking permission it started to feel like an invasion of my privacy. In the end I stopped checking my email because people were trying their hardest to force me into making decisions and I think I would have regretted a lot of them.”

Despite that, Pip is still encouraged by his overall experience. “I had a lot of tweets from people saying my blog had totally changed their opinion of Gypsy and Traveller people and that for me made it all worth it. And while I did get negative comments, the letter was the first time that the positives outweighed the negatives.”

Losing Sentiment

The letter had a visible affect on Channel 4 too. First and foremost, the episode directly following on from Pip’s blog attained 4.4 million viewers, a substantial fall on the 5.7 million that had tuned in the previous week.

This gave ITV a comfortable victory in the ratings war for that timeslot, with its coverage of the Brit Awards topping 6 million viewers. To put that into perspective, when the same two programmes went up against each other in 2011, My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding easily came out on top, picking up 8.05 million viewers to the Brit Awards’ 4.79 million.

But it wasn’t just in the hard numbers that Pip’s letter seemed to make an impact. Of those viewers that did stick around to watch the second show, their sentiment towards the programme dramatically decreased. Whereas positivity surrounding the show reached 25% on 14th February (with negativity at just 4%), the episode on the 21st – three days after Pip’s letter – saw positive sentiment more than halved to 12%, while negativity rose to 9%.

Channel 4 responded with an open letter to Pip. The reply, written by commissioning editor for factual entertainment Nick Hornby, aimed to address some of the issues raised, claiming that the show was “celebratory and never derogatory”.

While Pip acknowledged their efforts in penning a response, he still had an issue with much of its content, some of which he felt appeared quite disingenuous.

It was a feeling shared by much of Twitter.

Providing a Platform

Pip didn’t intend for so many people to read his own letter. He certainly didn’t anticipate that national media outlets would pick it up, or expect a response from Channel 4.

But therein lies the awesome power that social media brings. It can give anyone – no matter their age or background – a platform, even if they weren’t necessarily looking for one.

“It was only because I’d started writing online during the battle for Dale Farm that I unintentionally became a blogger,” Pip, whose letter has now received more than 75,000 views, says.

“But the experience has taught me to believe in myself, and while the attention has been overwhelming, I now realise I have a duty to continue to help the voice of Romany Gypsy’s be heard. I’m trying to find that happy medium between being ‘little old me’ and a spokesperson for my community.”