It has been 100 episodes and more than four years since the exotically ghoulish cast of MIC first appeared on our screens. Characters have come and gone, but still the heads of Chelsea’s reality telly set are filled with the same thoughts of bed-hopping and mud-slinging as they were when the show first aired. This lot are a fascinating anthropological study in perpetuity, and we are still mesmerised by the authenticity of their emotional response – plus the number of lingerie brands the cast appear to own and operate. They are as unlikely to suggest heading to a bar that doesn’t serve cocktails with kumquats as they are to bring up election politics. Austerity? Must be a new club opening next to Boujiis. No doubt Prouders can get us on the list. Yeah boi.
For the show’s “centenary”, we mull over what, if anything, we have learned.
We’re not in Seahaven any more
The world is a very different place from what it was when The Truman Show was first released. Now we have social media to make the narrative that bit more meta. Worried that Louise and Alik might have broken up since his move back to New York? Not to worry, she went to a flea market and ate a lobster roll with him yesterday.
What’s more, while we got a solid lesson in parodic product placement from Meryl Truman, with her blatant adverts for “Chef’s Pals”, the MIC lot take willingly to Instagram to praise protein powders and teeth-whitening kits #ad. It is a strange new world when there is no horizon for your boat to bump into.
The most random cut is the deepest
Insults fly between cast members like custard pies at the circus, but, if 100 episodes have taught us anything, it is that the best insults are the least cerebral ones. Take a sparring Lucy Watson and the brilliantly acerbic Phoebe-Lettice Thompson. “Your nose ring looks really weird,” Lucy slings. “Your dress looks tacky,” Pheobs retorts. Pachow. I think we can call that 0-0.
Then there was the time Victoria told Millie, who was wearing a tuxedo at the time: “I think you’ve got the costume wrong tonight because it’s not Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” Weird. And the time Millie said that Spencer (who did, to be fair, look like he was channelling a 1950s Hovis ad) looked like a “chubby baker boy”.
A party’s not a party unless it’s a pardy
Parties are a massive yawn, but “pardies”, well, they’re rad. No MIC episode is complete without one. Think the worst decadence of the Daisy Buchanan set meets the opening of a Sloane Square lingerie pop-up – Bacchus would blush. There are pyjama pardies, pardies on boats, pool pardies, shooting pardies; you name it. There’s a common thread running through all of the pardies, though: major dramz.
Some of the more supposedly erudite cast members are occasionally coerced by the show’s producers into “hosting” more sophisticated pardies: recitals or dinner pardies. But, far from violin solos having a calming effect on the characters, Chelsea drama seems to reach an operatic high when set to arias and three-course feasts. A case in point: the time Victoria “Cruella De Vil is my idol” Baker-Harber called poor lugubrious Cheska a “fucking fat turkey” over one particularly well-lubricated banquet.
Distrust the man with hair like a Lego figurine and a grin like a Cheshire cat
The lads of the show can be truly awful. There are exceptions, of course, but in general, they are a car-crash mess of misogyny; mesmeric – in the same way you want to watch David Cameron’s mirror face over and over again.
The more Lego-ish the hair, the more of a plonker the man, it seems. I’m looking at you, Alex Mytton, a man whose coiffure is so fantastically large and immoveable that it looks like it has been baked by the heat of a thousand kilns. When the truth about his cheating finally came out, it forced one of the show’s more subtly improbable lines from then girlfriend Binky: “It was four times and four times only? Swear on my life.”
And you too, Spencer Matthews. Fantastically silly hair. How this man, who looks like a badly sketched impression of Gaston, gets away with cheating so regularly has had audiences open-mouthed for all nine series. His personal best? When he told ex-girlfriend Louise: “It’s hard to respect you when you allow me to cheat on you.”
Stressful things happen at spas/in dressing gowns
The female cast members seem to head to spas in Hampshire the way the rest of us pop to get a pint of semi-skimmed and a packet of Frazzles. But it is time they learned: just don’t go. These trips always end with tears dripping down well-exfoliated cheeks. In the nine series the show has been running, there have been precisely 478 trips to spas. Dramz occurrence rate: 100%.
Boethius’s wheel revolves fast in south-west London
From the top to the bottom and back again in a flash; the fortunes of the MIC lot are perpetually in motion. Take that brief interlude where the series’ sweet resident labrador-boy Jamie Laing, heir to the McVitie’s fortune, thought he was in love with longtime pal Binky. It was over almost before the night was out. That said, you’ve got to be careful about trusting anyone who owns even a single pair of pony-skin loafers, or who can fall in and out of love with 75% of Chelsea in less time than it takes for the European court of justice to decide whether his family’s Jaffa Cakes are cakes or biscuits.
What happens in Verbier (Dubai/St Tropez/Barcelona) stays in … gets back to Chelsea almost immediately
Whether it is via the more sinewy pathways of Instagram or the more direct phone call from one pal on a yacht in the Med to another back at the Phene, news of illicit flirting or hook-ups with off-limits partners travels fast among the Chelsea set. Don’t these bozos realise they’re being filmed?
Possibly the most blatant of the lot was the time in Dubai that Spencer turned up on the beach with a new girl called Sophie. They just hooked up: “I can’t even pretend to like Sophie any more,” he laments. Louise is there too – it’s her birthday and Spenny plans to woo her with smarm and a gift of a “day bracelet”. Shame she’s just started seeing his best boi Jamie. Cue Francis, who more often than not just Skypes in from down a diamond mine in Africa, calling Jamie with the bad news. The eventual return to London is somewhat awks.
‘Your early 20s really are the best time to get your first bronze bust’
Mark Francis, the man who thinks a live-in seamstress is a necessity, owns a pair of grape scissors and who would refuse a drink were it to be served by someone dressed as a centurion, is a one-stop shop for MIC teachings. Let us learn from him, for his word is good: “I once knew someone who had a sleeping bag and the moment I found out, that friendship was over.” And: “Unless you have a family tiara, you don’t wear one.” Duly noted.
