Daisy Aitkens, not Seven Days' Samantha
I have a bone to pick with Julia Roberts. Ever since her toothy grin professed to be “just a girl”, everyone has been obsessed with my hometown.
Notting Hill is the stage of Channel 4’s new reality show Seven Days and once again attention will be pulled to this sparkling neighbourhood.
It’s a great set up. Watch some locals go about their lives and interactively tell them what to do, whom to date, what to eat, where to shop. It’s like The Truman Show with hand puppets.
As the locals are that of Notting Hill, famed for it’s yummy mummies, artistic bohos and wannabe artistic bohos, those seven days will be fascinating, right? Mmm. Not so much.
As the show aired last night Twitter was packed to the brim with posts like ‘C4 axed Big Brother and gave us Seven Days. It’s like swapping a tub of Ben and Jerry’s for a melted Malteaser.’ They’re right.
What was great (that’s over the top – mildly interesting) about Big Brother were the characters. You had crazy, pocket sized, ‘who is she?!’ Nicci, salt of the earth Craig Phillips then Pete Burns (nuff said). Not so much a cross section as a dirty dolly mix of society. Good telly.
I live in Notting Hill and was asked to be part of the show. I use its gyms, I totter around the markets, I pose in front of my laptop in the local Starbucks, and I sleep in my tiny postage stamp of a bedroom. It’s all quite lovely. I have a nice time anyway. But, my god, would it make crap telly.
Portobello Road on a sunny day does feel like a film set. Westbourne Grove at Sunday brunch time is all long, lithe blondes pouting over their eggs benedict. It’s like the social pages of ES magazine have vomited all over the local Virgin Active Gym.
Dining at The Electric, I spend more time watching the people than my food. It’s a fun, fantasy place to live in. If I can mix with this lot I must have made it. (I mentally block out that my little bed is in Ladbroke Grove. Hey, it’s close enough.)
So, if Channel 4 were looking for the equivalent of the MTV aspirational show, The Hills. Good place to look. They just forgot one thing: Brits don’t do aspiration. That’s why we have Eastenders not Melrose Place.
I didn’t sign up for Seven Days because I knew my week would look, aside from fairly mundane, shiny and shallow. An actress slash writer who has similar blonde highlights to most of West London? Stop the press.
Most of the inhabitants of Da Hill are middle class people pretending their not. It’s all terribly British and all terribly dull. There were other people featured in the show: Moktar, fretting over money and job prospects; Cassie, a hippy mummy and pilot; and Javan, an aspiring rapper.
Fine and true. Some areas of Notting Hill aren’t as Richard Curtis-hued. But these are still normal people. And still just a bit, well, dull.
A couple of weeks ago I was dropped home in full hen night regalia (complete with learner signs) after filming a commercial. Some blokes outside my local pub jeered and hollered, I giggled and rushed indoors.
I wonder what Julia Roberts was up to at that exact same moment? No idea. But I know who I’d most rather be watching. We get reality everyday, everywhere. Stick to stories, I say.
