Is there too much 'poshness' on T.V.?Meggie Fairclough

The word ‘posh’ is long past its Spice Girl-inspired heyday, and it has now acquired the rather naff air of words like, well, ‘naff’. Yet if you tuned in to any TV over Christmas, you’ll have found it hard to ignore that ‘posh’ is back. Sadly I’m not talking about a Posh Spice comeback tour. From the fictional halls of Downton Abbey, to Channel 4’s (probably equally as fictional) eight seasons of Made In Chelsea and the BBC’s upcoming The Super Rich and Us, TV shows and documentaries are obsessively following the lives of the wealthy elite, and sounding a lot more RP for it. Jay Hunt, chief creative officer at Channel 4, justifies this change in commissioning: “As the economy feels more buoyant, we are seeing viewers drawn to more aspirational programming.” But setting aspiration aside, is there something sinisterly celebratory about our obsessive on screen portrayals of the upper class?

BBC2’s three part documentary series Posh People: Inside Tatler takes viewers behind the doors of Condé Nast’s Vogue House and into Tatler, the 300 year old high-society magazine that boasts “the wealthiest readership in the country” and where corgis make bestselling cover stars. With a print circulation of 160,000, for Tatler’s readers, good schools, polo and Jilly Cooper reign supreme. The day-to-day dilemmas of the editorial team make addictive viewing, if not somewhat baffling for those of us who’ve never graced their Bystander page. Which undergarms are appropriate for a cut-out-and-keep Kate Middleton doll? Has the whippet usurped the pug as the chic dog du jour?

Unlike similar fly on the wall magazine documentaries such as The Lady and the Revamp, Posh People is less concerned with waning sales and the future of print journalism in the digital era, but rather with the well-coiffed ladies and gents who make up the office and fill the magazine’s pages. As the programme’s executive producer Danny Horan explains, “We didn’t want to make a documentary about the workings of a magazine. It was the world they reported on. It uses Tatler as a prism to tell the story of class.” And the story that unfolds over the three episodes is ultimately as well-versed and scripted as the story of class in the UK always has been. The Tatler HQ’s team embody the poshness and well worn clichéd caricatures depicted in its glossy pages – ladies with Kate Middleton hairstyles, plummy accents and double-barrelled monikers that test the character limits of most bylines.

From one old story to another, ten years on from Channel 4’s documentary The F***ing Fulfords, the aristocratic Fulford family are back, starring in BBC Three’s Life is Toff. Offering us another prosaic glimpse behind the tattered curtains of their 3,000-acre estate, the six-part docu-soap revisits Francis Fulford and his four children as they try to bring the crumbling Great Fulford Estate into the modern world. As a family that has “been here since before the fucking monarchy” there’s no denying their aristo credentials, but the show focuses on the uncertain future of the family’s estate under the control of the Fulford siblings. When they’re not attempting to skin a recently shot squirrel and fashion a beer cozy out of its hide, the Fulford offspring are shown looking for savvy ways to cash in and restore the family’s estate to its former glory. Life is Toff offers an insight into how old money is trying to embrace the entrepreneurial spirit of the nouveau riche and replicate, in their own irreverent way, the lucrative success of Russian art dealers and Nigerian energy company owners. Perhaps inspired by the royal success of Duchy Originals, the Fulfords attempt to make artisan cheese and elderflower cordial, but their rancid goods seem more likely to bring about a slew of food poisoning lawsuits than financial salvation.

Channel 4 may have let go of the Fulfords, but their own programming about the super rich is wealth voyeurism at its finest. Posh Pawn is essentially Antiques Roadshow on crack, set in “the Beverly Hills of Britain” that is, apparently, Surrey. Unlike your local Cash Converters window filled with saxophones and Wii consoles missing their controllers, Prestige Pawnbrokers specialises in the high-end trading of Birkin Bags, Lamborghinis, fighter jets and personal submarines for cash. If you’re more in the mood for £185 dog coats and ‘cape drapes’ (like a formal gown but sassier) than flogging your gran’s Cartier diamond necklace, then there’s Liberty of London, also from Channel 4. Under the management of American Ed Burstell, the series follows his attempts to reenergise the British institution and bring its mock-Tudor splendour into the world of modern retail and attract the attention of new money. Trying to entice new customers, regardless of their background (as long as they have money!), Liberty is seen to be a force for good for all, where its “Open Call Day” sees financial benefits trickling down as far as Essex to a budding entrepreneur with a line of scented nail polishes.

While some would have us believe that Britain is sailing into a harmonious era of classlessness, the occasional sight of a Tory MP tucking into a Gregg’s sausage roll is not enough to dispel the evidence of our enduring obsession with class. The popularity of programmes showcasing the disparity between the haves and have-nots proves problematic for public perceptions of extreme wealth. In an age of severe social inequality, where demands for a fairer society consistently go unmet, shows like Made in Chelsea, Posh People and The Super Rich and Us are fuelling our obsession with caricatures of poshos as loveable eccentrics, gamboling around their personal National Trust-esque properties. And when one considers the way those at the other end of the class spectrum are represented and misrepresented on screen, the troubling stance of TV commissioners and executives becomes even more apparent.

Just as Posh People revealed that 90 per cent of Tatler staff are privately educated, in Benefits Street, James Turner Street in Birmingham was made famous for the fact that 90 per cent of its residents claimed benefits. Yet the critical voice and political narrative that underlie ‘poverty porn’ programmes such as Benefits Street or Skint is absent from ‘poshness porn’, where TV execs prefer to daintily tip-toe around the thorny issues of widening inequality and the absurd privilege of the wealthy elite in modern Britain. Instead they opt for a sympathetic ‘aren’t they odd’ tone, as with the hapless Fulford brood, or even for praising the occasional charitable leanings of the rich, as with Liberty of London. It seems that in TV, as in politics, we are afraid to confront the problems of inequality where they are most blatantly manifest.