Big Fat Gypsy Stereotypes

Round 2 of Channel 4's voyeuristic look at Gypsy weddings ended on Tuesday night after 5 episodes, spawning millions of viewings and countless tweets, all of which came not without a dose of controversy, just take a look here, here and here.

For the purpose of this blog post I thought I'd take a look at the tweets in question and boy, was I shocked. Take this one, for example: Why the fuck should gypo's get a voice when they don't pay for anything? Swerving c**s#BigFatGypsyWeddings.

Wow. Now not all the tweets were quite so vulgar, inhereintly racist and as disgusting as this but it definitely demonstrates just how much animosity still exists towards the Gypsy and Traveller community. Which is exactly what the last episode, Bride and Prejudice, set out to demonstrate. Only it didn't, I believe anyway. Once again we were thrust into the glitzy, tacky, tits and tiaras world of the OTT Gypsy wedding, with a few slices of the prejudice and racism they are faced with every day. We saw some miss spelled racist graffiti and a few blurred out country men grumbling the word 'gypo'. But ok, the title suggests it had to stick to one constand theme.

The show is a prime time entertainment programme, 'cause we love nothing more than a bit of smug-tastic telly time, basically laughing and/or sneering at the stuff other people do. As the episodes went on, it appeared to attempt to distance itself from the tenacious onslaught of humongous dresses and blurred out grooms, as it delved deeper into the culture and psyche of Gypsy men and the vehermently conservative traditions they stand by.

After the success of My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, which aired last year, it was clear there was a sudden interest in the community, presumably why Channel 4 commissioned a further, extended series. However, although the show promised 'unpresendented access to the UK's most secretive communities', we were still bombarded with the same clichéd twadle we'd seen before. We didn't see any REAL racism, we didn't find out why the mortality rate for Gypsies is so much lower than country people and there was rarely a clear distinction between Irish Travellers and Romany Gypsies, which in my mind are quite different.

I have a personal attatchment and fascination with Gypsy and Traveller culture ever since I did a report on a Gypsy site for University and have since sought to make people think twice before they judge. And just for the record, the Gypsies I worked with were nothing like what Big Fat Gypsy Weddings displayed; true, they are private, proud people who mostly just want to integrate with our communities, but no, they don't all trot about spray tanning their children and boozing in graveyards. But they wouldn't make as interesting a documentary, I'll bet.

I do think that the show had good intentions and it mostly succeeded in showing us the cultural diversity existing on our doorstep, however people will always be left to make their own conclusion of what they see on television, which you only need to look on twitter to see that it isn't always a pleasant one. Ultimately, people will always be suspicious of things they don't understand, and Gypsies will fall under that category for many years to come.