Abstract
This chapter considers what discourses of celebrity and individualism in the New Labour era can tell us about the continuities of Thatcherism into the twenty-first century. In particular, it considers how the Thatcherite subject, a ‘moneyed and uncultured’ fictional trope which first appeared in Martin Amis’s Money (1984), was reinvented in the ITV series Footballers’ Wives (2002–06). In doing so, I suggest that the development of this character type highlights the precarious and uncertain social class status of those who are ‘famous for being famous’; class is represented in the series as a performative, not fixed, aspect of individual identity.
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Notes
- 1.
In 2008, Conor Burns, now a Conservative MP, wrote in a ConservativeHome article that Thatcher had cited New Labour as her greatest achievement while addressing guests at an event in Hampshire in 2002.
- 2.
Money has been listed, on multiple occasions, as one of the top hundred greatest novels of all time by publications including Time and the Guardian. In 2010, it was adapted into a BBC television drama starring Nick Frost.
- 3.
The term ‘WAG’ (used to refer to the wives and girlfriends of footballers) became most prominent at the time of the 2006 FIFA World Cup. As a supplement to its reports on the sporting event, much of the British tabloid press also featured pictures and commentaries on the WAGs’ lifestyles. Tony Manfred (2011) suggests that it was perhaps the public interest in Victoria Beckham, generated by her purple-themed wedding to David Beckham, that sparked a broader interest in other WAGs and WAG culture.
- 4.
The official Footballer’s Wives website lists the comparisons between these characters in an interview with actor Ben Price. In addition, the comparisons were also made in The Sun, The Daily Mirror, The Evening Standard and The Guardian.
- 5.
At this point in its history, The Sun supported Tony Blair and the New Labour Party. The newspaper had supported the Conservatives during the premierships of Mrs Thatcher (1979–90) and John Major (1990–97), but switched its support to New Labour shortly before the 1997 General Election. Then, following the election of William Hague as Conservative Party Leader, it cemented its support for Blair by portraying the new Leader of the Opposition as a dead parrot and declared the Conservatives an ‘ex-party’. It was not until late 2009 (when Gordon Brown was New Labour Leader) that The Sun returned its support to the Conservative Party.
- 6.
It was between 2004 and 2006, at the same moment that WAG culture was emerging, that the first weekly ‘lads’ mags’, Nuts and Zoo, were published in the UK. Here, I suggest that a WAG’s celebrity status could be given without her consent because the term was created by the tabloid press. Certainly, there was an interest in the lifestyle of footballers’ wives before the term WAG was coined, but these women were a disparate group which included singers, models and fashion designers; the invention of the term WAG functioned as a speech act, bringing into being a new discrete group of celebrities with a specific identity over which the ‘WAGs’ themselves had no influence or control. This allowed those wives and girlfriends who were not famous for their own work (as Victoria Beckham and Cheryl Cole were) to be positioned as celebrities simply for being a WAG.
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Mullen, A. (2017). Public Property: Celebrity and the Politics of New Labour in Footballers’ Wives. In: Forrest, D., Johnson, B. (eds) Social Class and Television Drama in Contemporary Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55506-9_16
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