"Oh my God, I'm so jel!! Shuttupppppppp!" We have all heard of 'The Only Way Is Essex' (TOWIE) by now I'm sure. The show is on its fourth series of augmented reality type drama, and it's still going strong. I'm almost ashamed to admit that I have been an avid viewer of TOWIE since the first series when I heard Chris Moyles taking the mick out of one of the girls on the radio (Sam Elizabeth Faiers sounding like she said her name was "Sam Available for Affairs). I have really enjoyed this show for the last couple of years, but I have to say, I think it's going downhill (if that's even possible).
The original cast was fairly small and all seemed to know each other. They all had their dramas and tantrums within a little group, and even though we know it's set up, the plot flowed fairly naturally. Now, the cast has expanded, which isn't necessarily a good thing. The chemistry and personality that the original characters had seems to have been lost, with only two or three of the current characters being ones that started the show. Now we seem to have family members, distant friends and random women all creeping in to jump on the TOWIE bandwagon. Mark Wright's cousin? Harry's boyfriend? Strange girls Kirk met at a petrol station? They've all had their 15 minutes (and sometimes much more) of fame. As a result, the scenarios are much more forced. There are plenty of moments that you know that the characters aren't really friends and wouldn't usually spend time together, but they have been forced together for the good of a juicy story line, and sometimes it just doesn't work.
For example, the new girls Billie and Carla (or maybe it's Cara, I don't actually know as I refuse to view these two as proper characters on the show) suddenly seem to be best friends with everyone. I'm sorry, I know people are always saying "small world" but I can't believe it's that small. Kirk met Billie at a petrol station and he and Joey briefly dated the pair last season. Now they are at Lauren Goodger's girly get togethers, they are Lucy's shoulder to cry on and I believe they were present at Lydia's birthday meal. I suppose this is the problem with this kind of augmented reality; people are brought into the show and forced to become friends with other members of the cast to diversify story lines and get them more screen time.
This leads on neatly to the situations that you can tell the producers know about but just force the characters into, or even set up themselves. To be fair it does make for some brilliant TV at times, like the time that Lauren Pope caught Kirk out on a date and he called her friend Maria an extra, but we should probably remember that these are real people, and these are their lives we're watching fall apart on national television. It just seems a bit cold hearted really. The story lines used to be funny, bitching, quarrelling, yelling, more bitching, but I don't like some of the more recent ones. Lucy and Mario's problems a couple of weeks ago was almost enough to make me stop watching. This probably sounds strange as it is tame compared to most of the stuff in the soaps or even on Jeremy Kyle, but I didn't like the way it was used on the programme.
For those who don't know, Lucy is dating Mario, a ladies man. He loves her but is mad at her because she cheated on him in a drunken one night stand, but they are back together and happy-ish. In the episodes a couple of weeks back, Lucy went to some of the other girls and said to them that she was suspicious becuase Mario wouldn't let her look at his messages. The other girls (in typical TOWIE inflammatory nature) said she was right to be suspicious and that something obviously wasn't right. This is all fine, but then then Lucy was shown alone in Mario's flat (where she doesn't live) deciding whether or not to look at messages on his iPad and then eventually looking at them and bursting into tears. She then goes back to the friends to explain that she had found 50 plus messages to other girls.
My issue is this: surely the producers would have known whether or not these messages were actually there, because if they weren't there wouldn't have been a story line worth pursuing. So I'm thinking either Lucy had already discovered these messages and then had to stage this moment again so it could be filmed, or the producers encouraged Lucy to look at the messages while filming to get the reaction. I think both of these are pretty cruel things to do. From what I can gather, TOWIE have specific filming days, so it's not like they are followed around by cameras waiting to capture something exciting like in documentaries or whatever. So Lucy must have been told to go to Mario's flat and look at his messages. I know that the people in TOWIE get paid to do this and there's the argument that once people have become desperate for fame and let themselves into the public eye in such a way as the cast of the show have done, they should expect stuff like this. I can see the point of this, but I still think it is cruel to film the break up of a real reltionship like this.
To be fair, it could all be completely staged and none of this could of happened, meaning I'm just a loser who reads far too much into what they watch on TV, so in case that is true, I am going to shut up about this now and end by saying that, aside from all that I've rabbited on about, for some reason I still can't tear myself away from this programme, so rant over and I will probably write a post far less caring and intellectually questioning this show soon, and far more along the lines of how much better I think Chloe looks with lighter hair and how much of an idiot Joey Essex is.
Ps, I'm sorry I couldn't be bothered to put any photos into this post, google image searching seems to just come up with tons of pictures of Mark Wright with food in his mouth or Amy Childs getting out of cars, and I don't think we really need to see any of that!!
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