The royalists at Disney (they love a good princess story) are involved in a new reality-television social experiment where we get to see the conception, birth and first brand partnership of an aristocratic nepo baby.
Television cameras have never before captured this moving natural phenomena. (It was largely left to VIP magazine.) They haven’t called the show Nepo Baby, however; they have called it Raising Chelsea (Disney+), for it features Jamie Laing and Sophie Habboo, two stars of the posh-person reality show Made in Chelsea, which is usually found on Channel 4.
Who are Jamie and Sophie? Jamie is a row of grinning teeth beneath a tuft of sunbleached thatch, and Sophie is a swirling mass of skincare products that have come together roughly in the shape of a woman.
They both speak in the type of neighing accent that is both unintelligible to me and makes me want to clutch my flat cap respectfully, deny the truth of transubstantiation and beg for soup.
When the communists at Channel 4 first launched Made in Chelsea it was obviously meant as the first blow in a bloody class war. The pitch was simple: “Here they are, the unproductive scions of the upper classes. This is more or less exactly where they live. Here are the schematics of the buildings. This is when their servants are on and off duty. I think you know what you need to do.”
But they should have probably arranged buses and distributed pitchforks as well, because the plain people of Britain missed the point and just sat there chuckling at people with names like Toffy and Bunty and Winkles going on foreign adventures and talking endlessly about their various relationships.
Thirty-one series later it’s clear that the common folk of Britain will only ever rise up and be free when the Irish are in a position to liberate them. We’re a few years off that yet.
And so it is that we meet Jamie and Sophie once more on Disney, their real home. They have been, we are told, “building a global empire” (classic British poshos) with podcasts and radio shows and brand deals. They have also “captured the nation’s hearts”, which I take to mean they’ve requisitioned the transplant fridge at the NHS because they want a few spares. And now they’re gifting us a new instalment from their lives.
Raising Chelsea: Jamie Laing and Sophie Habboo. Photograph: Disney+
We are also told at the outset that Sophie is ovulating. Meanwhile, Jamie is emitting spores or whatever it is posh people do. And so events take their natural course.
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It’s unclear to me what the specifics are, because I am ignorant about the fine details of the posho reproductive cycle.
Jamie is equally nonplussed. “When we first tried to conceive it was a s**tshow,” he says, which definitely suggests they were doing it wrong for a bit.
Luckily, they get the hang of it, probably with the pressure of a Disney deadline hanging over them.
We time-jump four months to a moment when Sophie is filming herself telling Jamie that she is pregnant. Jamie leaps up from his repose with fatherly excitement. He can’t wait to eat that baby or stick it on a horse or send it to boarding school or whatever it is the posh do with their first-born progeny.
We are soon accompanying the affluent duo to a private clinic – not for them the simple miracles of the NHS – where we see them gaze with wonder at an ultrasound image.
They can see their child, his little fingers and his little head and his own little camera crew gestating over to the left. If you zoom in you can even see him signing a contract with a teeny embryonic brand agency. Then he does finger guns.
Raising Chelsea: Jamie Laing and Sophie Habboo. Photograph: Sophie Mutevelian/Disney+
We meet Jamie and Sophie’s extended family. “My family are really close, but my dad lives in Spain and my mum lives in Portugal,” Sophie says, although these are probably just different wings of the same house.
Jamie is very close to his mother. She’s a no-nonsense posh person who has dogs jumping up and down on her most of the time. Jamie calls her “Mumsy”. “Nipples forward – lead with your nipples,” she says to Jamie when advising him on life. “I give up.” Freud screams from his urn. (“I gave up in series one of Made in Chelsea,” Marx sighs a few kilometres down the road.)
A friend helps them renovate their hugely fancy posh home, and when they go to look at the finished product he leaves out a miniature football kit for the entitled but still gestating child of Chelsea. Sophie and Jamie are moved. “Someday,” they think, “our son might own that club.”
The episode ends with a big family gathering in their newly refurbished home. Everyone has to take their shoes off when they enter, which is, as you know, protofascistic behaviour in Britain or Ireland, a definite red flag. (To relatives reading: I don’t mean your house.)
Jamie and Sophie are rich enough to live without any real friction, which is hard to script in reality. So this subject matter is quite clever, because birth – the creation of whole new humans – is inherently dramatic, and new humans (or “babies”, as some call them) are inherently sympathetic.
That said, I’m not convinced that the performance of “stress” and “bickering” we witness here is as “authentic” as the creators would have us believe. Indeed, I’m not convinced the word “authentic” has meant anything at all since “scripted reality” first went to town on our sense of reality, many years ago.
Jamie and Sophie seem reasonably inoffensive. I just believe all of their money should be redistributed and used to build social infrastructure.
Then again, I also believed Sleeping Beauty should have shunned medieval aesthetic standards and helped the dwarves form an autonomous workers’ collective. Woke Comrade Whose Appearance Is Unimportant, I’d call it. Make that programme, Disney, you cowards.
Violent superhero romp The Boys (Prime Video) is also back this week, with its subversive commentary on fascistic ideologues, evil conglomerates and media manipulation. (Guilty as charged!)
Some very angry online people somehow watched this show and only realised that the murderously narcissistic Homelander (the excellent Antony Starr) was a real baddie when he sided with literal Nazis.
Showrunner Eric Kripke has doubled down on critiquing toxic, totalitarian grifters (one character is a manosphere influencer now) and also continues to be inventively disgusting.
It’s better than the original Garth Ennis comic series on which it is based and way better than a streaming superhero satire has any right to be. The new series is to be the last. I will be watching it to the end.