'Prejudiced' TV shows are turning people against Travellers

From Public Service Europe

Channel 4's Big Fat Gypsy Wedding and other shows are car-crash television that nod to the death of the idea of multiculturalism in Europe – says the Irish Traveller Movement in Britain

There is a scene that is a repeat motif in Big Fat Gypsy Wedding - the hit British 'observational documentary' featuring Irish Travellers, Romany Gypsies and English Travellers - that broke the ratings records and is fast becoming a pan-European export for Channel 4. The scene comprises of a young Irish Traveller woman dressed in high-fashion catwalk heels, a diamante low-cut top, bare skin uniformly tanned, hair sculpted and heavily made up - wordlessly tottering around the interior of a caravan, mopping, dusting and polishing already immaculate surfaces.

The scene taps seamlessly into some of the truisms and assumptions about Irish Travellers – and by extension; the United Kingdom's Romany Gypsies and English Travellers - that most non-Travellers uncritically hold. These are that the 'Traveller community' subjugates its women and that the culture is debased and a ludicrous pastiche of celebrity magazines and soap opera galas.

Let us go back to the scene with the young Traveller woman and try a more critical approach. As the day of the shoot drew nearer, the excitement would have been building on the site. Try to put yourself in that young woman's shoes. What would you have worn? Some BFGW 'characters' have gone onto Z-list celebrity fame and their own spin-off shows. Vox pops and interviews would have been recorded, opinions prompted and recorded and background footage shot. Only a fraction of what was taken would have been used. What has been used so far has dismayed many Gypsies, Travellers and the related campaign organisations.

Jake Bowers, Romany Gypsy and former editor of the Traveller's Times, said that BFGW portrayed Gypsies and Travellers as 'buffoons'. Jennifer Corcoran, a young Irish Traveller woman who interns at our organisation simply puts her head in her hands and mumbles 'shocking' whenever BFGW is mentioned. Margaret Doran, an Irish Traveller community leader, says that the series has put the fight for Traveller rights and recognition back 20 years.

It is obvious why BFGW is so popular. It is car-crash television that feeds into - and inflames - the extremely visible political and social conflict around Gypsy and Traveller site provision in the UK and nods towards themes of dysfunctional absolute otherness versus assimilation that are playing out amidst the crackdown on the Roma in Europe; and the death of the idea of multiculturalism. It is big, brash, snobby, snide, deadpan, knowing and presented in the patronising style of You've been Framed.

It uses sleight of hand to allow the viewer to laugh at cartoonish and seemingly racist representations of some of the most marginalised and persecuted ethnic minorities. Implicitly, explicitly and by juxtaposition - the prejudiced tropes fly thick and fast. Travellers don't pay tax, they are parasites, the women are downtrodden brood mares, Traveller men are brutal and criminal. Travellers steal, they are insular. They deny their children an education and their children are feral. And all this is put down to Traveller culture, the people themselves and their Quixotic clinging onto an archaic fixed identity - they are to blame, we are told.

Of course - the producers leaven this with sympathetic characters, scenes that seem to contradict the stereotypes but the strong narrative thrusts win out and the message is loud and clear: 'They' need to be more like 'us' for their own good and it is their own fault if they are not. In Orwellian fashion, Channel 4 stonewalls complaints by pointing out that Gypsies and Travellers must like it because they are on it.

The broadcaster also say that it just films what is in front of the crew; with the implication that if you do not like it then it is because you do not like Travellers. The channel has also publicly apologised to 'some of the community' when billboards advertising the second series splashed the tag-line 'Bigger, Fatter Gypsier' over the face of an aggressive looking child – and media regulator the Advertising Standards Authority was finally forced to act.

Yet, do not be fooled by the apology. It does not digress from Channel 4's insistence that most Gypsies and Travellers like the show. In fact, some must like it. Some have vested interests in BFGW and some teenage Travellers are drawn to the razzmatazz and the false promise of celebrity. Yet regardless of its alleged popularity amongst Travellers themselves, we tend look at the same thing in different ways.

Context is everything and there are exponentially more non-Travellers watching BFGW than there are Travellers and the message to them is unequivocally negative. So BFGW is worrying. It reflects the current political climate in much of Europe. It celebrates homogeneity by emphasising the difference and deviance of an easily delineated and - in this case - racialised 'other' who are represented in ways that define the narrowing limits of what is normal, sociable, acceptable and – increasingly – legal. It is worrying because we have been here before.

Mike Doherty is a communications officer at the Irish Traveller Movement in Britain