Acting Up: the myth of TOWIE is starting to get real

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Sian Davis reports on a new twist to media stereotypes: people performing to type in a real life version of ‘reality TV’.

They’re having a laugh.

Right across the county, that was the reaction to The Only Way Is Essex (TOWIE) when it first came out. Not until the coming of ‘reality TV’ had Essex ever seen so much fake tan. Words like ‘reem’ or ‘shoo’ were unheard of – until TOWIE. But now some people are starting to imitate the show, even though they must know it’s mainly fantasy.

Thankfully, not everyone is acting this way.

Essex man Alex Cornwell is a pale-skinned zoology graduate who’s never been to a gym and is more interested in animal conservation than spurious TOWIE conversation. ‘To start it was only representative of a tiny fraction,’ he recalls. ‘But increasingly over the years I see more people re-enacting the programme.’

Student Amy Brown (stilettos only occasionally, minimal make-up, no vagazzle) complains that TOWIE ‘gives people in Essex a bad reputation’, and sets ‘a bad example for young people’. In her eyes, worse than the programme are the people pretending it’s real. ‘I think they play to the stereotype deliberately – no one I know sounds like that!’, she insists.

But there’s no telling who’s going to fall for it. When I came back for my first Christmas break after going away to university, I decided to meet up with a friend I had known for 14 years. When we met, to my horror her face was bright orange and she had glued false eyelashes over her real ones. I asked her what was going on, to which she replied: ‘Everyone in Essex dresses like this now. God, you’ve been in London too long’.

I had been in London for three months.

It seems to me that Essex has become divided, with some people carrying on as they always have and others playing up to this ridiculous TV programme. It’s crazy how people have watched a far-fetched, badly written, dreadful TV show and rather than protest to the producers about how unrealistic it is, they are actually starting to re-enact it!

If this goes on, soon you will be able to go to Essex and see TOWIE as the documentary it always pretended to be (but everyone used to know it wasn’t).

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