For a couple of years, I worked the odd shift on a luxury magazine. It was (and still is) the Argos catalogue of the One Per Cent, with features on yachting in the turquoisest parts of the Caribbean, wine tasting in the Frenchest parts of France and watches with price tags that would make a Russian oligarch choke on his breakfast caviar. And I was its occasional stand-in fact checker. For the most part, this meant looking at prices of things. Expensive things.
I remember phoning the press office for a posh jeweller to check that a particular diamond necklace was indeed £350,000. There’s something so embarrassing about discussing that sort of figure over the phone. Both me and the affable PR girl – Imogen, or Francesca, or Verity – clearly knew it was stupid. I wanted to say something. I wanted to say, “So, we have the necklace down as three hundred and fifty fucking thousand pounds. Is that the correct monumentally insane price?
I didn’t though, because Imogen/Francesca/Verity was nice. So I just sat, stewing in adolescently communist thoughts.
“Whoever buys this necklace,” I thought, “fuck you and your things”.
And things, it seems, have never been so poignant. TV screens are plastered with Bentleys and jizzing bottles of Dom Perignon, following the trend for documentaries and reality shows about the super-rich. We can’t get enough of these people. The BBC’s Posh People: Inside Tatler gave us a porny peep at old money, while more recent two-part documentary The Super-Rich and Us focuses more on the newer sort. Both kinds suck in their own ways. And in a world where the 85 richest people are as wealthy as the poorest three billion, a £350,000 necklace is a sign of things gone arse up and tits backwards. It’s trite, I know. But sometimes trite things need to be repeated again and again and again, until the right people start listening.
It’s about time we truly made pariahs out of billionaires. At least to the point at which we scrub them the hell off our TV screens. Fair enough, The Super-Rich and Us, the first episode of which aired last week, is actually a look into how the recession has widened the gap between rich and poor. It’s not meant to be aspirational, but it might as well be. It features interviews with billionaires doing some pretty billionaire-ish stuff. No one wants to see that. Frankly, I’d rather look at a haemorrhoid, or Nigel Farage, or even Nigel Farage’s haemorrhoid, than another Chelsea bastard shoving his utterly carefree lifestyle down the population’s collective cake hole. Visibly rich people on our screens are just the fattest dumplings in a stew of televisual depressingness. “Everything you love to eat is killing you. No, really and truly killing the fuck out of you,” says TV, “and if carbs don’t kill you, terrorists will. And if they don’t, we’re more than due a colossal natural disaster. And, by the way, here’s diarrhoea in a sharp suit driving its Lamborghini to the nearest diamond shop.”
This constant showcasing of freakish wealth almost wouldn’t be so offensive if it weren’t happening alongside programmes like last year’s Benefits Street. While making monsters of the working class, we’re, OK, not so much lauding the super-rich, but giving them enough exposure to show off their things until they run out of things to show us. Flashiness used to be a matter of bad taste and nothing else. Now though, it’s about so much more than aesthetics. When society has never been less equal, flaunting what you have (no matter how ugly and useless it seems to the rest of the world) is, above all, profoundly insensitive.
We’ve had our fun judging the super-rich for their jewel-encrusted bidets, but it’s about time, now, we stop giving them a platform. Effectively, they’re only making us more miserable. Just look at the Rich Kids of Instagram Tumblr. Boy, do we love to hate these insecure teenagers who post pictures of themselves pouring champagne over cornflakes, amongst other costly capers. They say we’re just jealous, and we are. Not of their god-awful things, but of their luck. It’s one thing to have earned (ethically or not) enough money to swim in, it’s quite another just to happen to be the offspring of someone who did. The vast majority of us spend a decent chunk of our lives worrying about money. If you’re not one of us, kindly shut up about it.
Our masochistic fascination with the super-rich needs to end right now. While we’re waiting for that to happen, if you’re lucky enough to be flying somewhere, just make sure you fart when you’re walking through business class. For humanity’s sake.
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