Channel 4 must have fallen on Trewley Precious and her family with sobbing gratitude. An articulate, charismatic gift to the camera who is also a member of the segment of the population with which the broadcaster has long been most pruriently fascinated. Jackpot!! I like to think of her standing there, in all her contoured, coiffed, lashed and fillered glory, patting the grovelling film-makers on the head with the satisfaction of knowing that her time has truly come.<\/p>\n
Trewley Precious, if you have not had what I suspect is soon to be the inescapable pleasure, is an online influencer (nearly a million people follow her on TikTok) and member of the Traveller community who now stars \u2013 alongside her four siblings and their magisterial mother Tina \u2013 in the new reality series Secret Lives of Gypsy Wives. Trewley describes the clan as \u201clike the Kardashians if they were broke! If the Kardashians were fat and on benefits!\u201d Which is fair comment, but they are also like the Kardashians if Kris\u2019s pod people had a sense of humour, irrepressible energy, charm and an abundance of affection for each other. I cannot imagine Khlo\u00e9 replying to an inquiry from Kim about what she\u2019s done to prepare for their mother\u2019s birthday with a cheery \u201cMore than what you\u2019ve done, fatty!\u201d as Trewley does to brother Jamie.<\/p>\n
Trewley, Jamie, Honey, Ruby-Anne and Pearlygirl grew up as part of a traditional Traveller family \u2013 ruled by the patriarch, wives expected to cook, clean and have babies, daughters expected to grow up and do likewise \u2013 on a deprived council estate, where they have painted their house pink. Tina, not a Traveller, grew up in poverty and without a consistent home so insisted to her husband that, despite his natural wanderlust, they stay in one place and raise their family. She has now lived there 40 years. Ruby-Anne lives with her, Trewley lives in a pink chalet in the garden and the other girls all married young and live nearby with their own families. Jamie \u2013 much to the perturbation of his father, Sidney \u2013 eschewed the trad life and became an estate agent and remains just as close to his family in every sense as the rest.<\/p>\n
Sidney died less than three years ago and they are all still clearly devastated by the loss. \u201cI can\u2019t talk,\u201d says Trewley, as she begins to describe it. \u201cI feel like I\u2019m in a different world.\u201d They still buy presents from him for Tina on her birthday. \u201cTo my Teenie,\u201d runs the accompanying message on Trewley\u2019s. \u201cHappy birthday, old girl. Thank you for looking after our babies. I love you in this life and the next.\u201d The whole family falls silent for a moment in their shared grief. \u201cThat\u2019s lovely, Trew,\u201d says her brother approvingly. Then, nodding towards mum, who is having a good cry, \u201cYou\u2019ve ruined the whole day.\u201d The family erupts once more. Life goes on.<\/p>\n
\u2018I want an empire\u2019 \u2026 Trewley Precious. Photograph: Jude Edginton\/Jude Edgington\/Channel 4\/Optomen<\/p>\n
Even in the middle of sorrow, however, Trewley is beginning to see that her father\u2019s absence may create more freedom for her to realise her non-traditional ambitions. For Trewley \u2013 then just 25 \u2013 does not want, yet at least, to be a wife or mother. \u201cI want an empire.\u201d Brand collaborations are beginning to come in and money is being made, though she, quite rightly, won\u2019t say how much.<\/p>\n
She also wants a belly button piercing, but this \u2013 along with tattoos on women \u2013 is a Traveller no-no. \u201cYour mum will fucking rip it out of you,\u201d says Trewley\u2019s friend Robyn, whom Tina absorbed into her own clan as she did many others who came and went as they needed it over the years. It\u2019s only a slight exaggeration \u2013 Tina actually just throws her out of the house until the piercing is removed. Trewley is staying the course on the empire thing though.<\/p>\n
Beneath the glitz and glamour glimpses of darker, more painful truths can be seen. That they do live on the breadline is clear when Trewley reminisces fondly about how, \u201cWhen Dad died, everyone [on the estate] was waiting for their benefits to hit so they could buy us milk.\u201d That there are limits to the benefits of comradeship itself is also clear. \u201cYou either stay on that estate and slowly die or you go to prison,\u201d Trewley states, matter-of-factly, during one of the solo interviews to camera with which the more raucous family scenes are intercut: \u201cAnd I don\u2019t want that for my life.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trewley\u2019s star is on the rise, you hope. You hope she gets everything she wants, and that she learns to want more too. If the bleak vision of Britain that underlies her family\u2019s story is anything to go by, however, we will have to hope very hard indeed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Channel 4 must have fallen on Trewley Precious and her family with sobbing gratitude. An articulate, charismatic gift…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":551309,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[146,85,46,411],"class_list":["post-551308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=551308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551308\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/551309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=551308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=551308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=551308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}