Beautiful Gypsies are Better Than You!

Gypsies have a hard time don’t they? If you ever see one on TV they’re usually putting a curse on someone and it’s this type of stereotyping that Big Fat Gypsy Weddings is trying to rid the world of. Because of course they don’t go round putting curses on vampires and such, you would be a dickhead to think that, in fact according to Big Fat Gypsy Weddings they’re just like you and me, but better.
BFGW has the honour of being the most watched Channel 4 programme since Big Brother back in 2008. A sentence that should read “8 million watch Peep Show again” actually reads “BFGW is the most watched programme since Big Brother”. I never understood Big Brother, what should have been an opportunity to judge those horrible desperate people became a platform to put them on a pedestal and praise their every breath and bowel movements. It remained partly popular not by judgers but by people who wanted to be just like them, they wanted to sit in a house and talk, and then not have to work for the rest of their lives. BFGW should be a stage for judgement, but instead it’s a stage for love, appreciation and envy, gosh they have a nice life, swoon!
The modern English preconception of a gypsy (or pikey) is of a horrible person who doesn’t pay taxes and leaves shit everywhere. While it would obviously be wrong to tarnish a whole community with the same shitty brush it is equally wrong to so fervently paint an eloquent picture of an idyllic wanderlust paradise, and that’s what Channel 4 have done. You would expect a documentary such as this to be judgemental, to point at the gypsies and go “ergh look at them! They smell, look at that boy riding a horse, what a prick, they make me sick”.
Instead it’s actually quite biased towards the gypsies, turning a blind eye towards things that a “normal” person would be judged for. Take the gypsy art of grabbing for example, where a man will “grab” a woman and do what they like. Not even the dictionary has a nice definition of the word grab, but the producers of BFGW cared not for what was probably just slang for rape and moved quickly on, ignoring a helpless girl in a car park.
With a tweaked narration the show could be very different, with all the grabbing and fighting and suspiciously expensive cars there should be at the very least a mention that the sun doesn’t shine out of all their arseholes. Why not ask them where they really get all their money from? One man hired a fucking helicopter! It’s as if the producers were afraid to make them look bad, perhaps they’ve seen Snatch and would rather not be shot.
Every girl and woman is portrayed as strong and beautiful, and every man is strong and masculine. There must be some scummy gypsies out there, the show may be highlighting that they’re good people, but if you take a random handful of people, at least one of them will be a cunt, (as it’s known in mathematics, the cunt coefficient). BFGW doesn’t know the meaning of the word and would have you believe that despite all the bad things we can clearly see them doing, they’re courteous, affable, honest, civilised people, and you’d be lucky to be half as good as they are.
The title, Big Fat Gypsy Weddings is misleading as the whole wedding thing takes a backseat and is a mere footnote, a more fitting title would be Beautiful Gypsies are Better Than You! Though that would be a lie because when you are presented with a wedding it just looks like Jordan’s, only slightly less/more tacky. It’s not just the bride who looks like Jordan though, it’s every woman, girl and even baby, and here is where the judging/admiring takes place depending on where you stand on morality, “Oh they’re beautiful!”, “They look like Jordan”.
If you’re an idiot and didn’t quite understand what was going on with all the moving pictures and narration, there’s some scouse woman to tell you everything about gypsies every five minutes, how do we know what she’s saying is true? She could be making this all up, “every Tuesday a gypsy eats a squirrel”. Her presence is bewildering and it makes you want to see a documentary called Big Fat Scouse Wedding Planners in which gypsies tell us all about her, “I wanted a traditional church wedding and she made me look like fucking Jordan!”
Perhaps I’ve misinterpreted the show, perhaps I’ve become too pessimistic of mankind and nothing can escape my ghastly cynicism, you could have a documentary about charity workers and I’d probably call them all cunts. Perhaps as a nation we have become a society where we need to judge others to feel good about ourselves. Am I naïve to think that this show could have been anything other than a device for judging? Are the majority of the viewers still judging gypsies despite the show’s spin? And has our opinion of gypsies changed in the slightest? Answers on a postcard.