Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Made in Like Chelsea

2013; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.18573/j.2013.10246

2049-2340

John Seed,

Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism

It would be easy to write off Made in Chelsea as very bad television, the embarrassed and embarrassing exposure of the empty days of a bunch of spoilt metropolitan brats – what Amber, a 19-year old Chelsea socialite, describes as ‘the whole like Chelsea socialite thing’. It is indeed very bad television – crass, vulgar, inept and shameless. It is a kind of anti-psychoanalysis, doing for the haute bourgeoisie what Jeremy Kyle does for the lumpen proletariat. But it may be worth a closer look for what it tells us about contemporary British society and about the beneficiaries of neo-liberalism – those important people whose lives are untouched by the experience of austerity imposed on the rest of us. This article was written in March 2013: the series may well change and continue to change after the time of writing.