Are the Rees-Moggs ready for their new reality?

I felt slightly anxious for Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg when I read he’d agreed to have a reality show made about his family by an American television channel. I imagine most people’s reaction on hearing this was to think: ‘Are you stark raving bonkers?’ But as someone who’s appeared in several reality shows and been followed around by a BBC camera crew for a fly-on-the-wall documentary, I don’t think this was necessarily a mistake. It all depends on how the Rees-Moggs are portrayed, and while I doubt they’ll be able to control that – being given ‘final cut’ on such programmes is a rarity – they should be able to influence it.

Half the fun will be watching the posh Rees-Moggs trying not to say anything snobbish

The first thing Jacob and his family must realise is they’re not appearing in a documentary, but a drama. It’s obvious to anyone who spends five minutes watching Keeping Up with the Kardashians that the ‘reality’ being documented is actually a series of intersecting narratives revolving around the cast and their romantic relationships, creating a kind of soap opera. And these narratives are scripted by the programme makers. Not in the sense that their words are written for them, although I imagine they’re heavily prompted. What I mean is, the producers will have a clear idea of what each character’s ‘story’ is and that will dictate what they choose to film and, more importantly, how to assemble the resulting footage. That sounds scary, as if Jacob, his wife Helena and their six children will just be meat puppets, assigned different roles in a story the producers won’t want to deviate from.

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To a certain extent that’s true, but the Rees-Moggs can take some comfort from the fact that the ‘arc’ given to each ‘character’ will be the standard hero’s journey in which they’re assigned a commonplace psychological ‘wound’, such as lacking self-confidence, then presented with a series of challenges they’ll have to overcome and, in the process, discover inner strengths that will enable them to ‘heal’.