Bobby Brazier was famous even before he was born. His parents, the television stars Jade Goody and Jeff Brazier, announced his impending arrival in an interview for OK! magazine, and when Brazier was barely a month old, he appeared on his first magazine cover. Later he and his younger brother Freddie occasionally popped up on Goody’s Sky reality show. Still, watching the 20-year-old on Strictly Come Dancing has been like seeing a star emerge. His mix of cheerfulness and childlike enthusiasm, combined with his striking features and rangy foal-like limbs, is a small joy.
His months on Strictly have crowned a meteoric ascent. Brazier joined EastEnders late last year as Freddie Slater, and won a National Television award for his role in September – the same month he joined Strictly. In October, he appeared on the cover of Grazia, and the Daily Mail quoted sources describing him as the big hope of the BBC, in the broadcaster’s attempt to bring in younger viewers. “Bobby dazzles, and so did his mum,” says Lucie Cave, the author, presenter and editor-in-chief of Heat magazine. “He is the perfect blend of both his parents – he has taken on Jeff’s grounded, zen nature, while embodying Jade’s endearing innocence, charm and excitement about the world around him. There’s a real purity and humility about him that is rare in a young star.”
So far, at least, his encounter with fame has been less bruising than his mother’s. Goody became Britain’s first reality megastar after appearing in the third series of Channel 4’s Big Brother in 2002. She was unashamedly loud, funny, a “firecracker and a force of nature”, says Cave. She was also a controversial figure, rightly vilified for her part in the racist bullying of the Indian actor Shilpa Shetty when they both appeared on Celebrity Big Brother in 2007. She apologised, and by the time of her death public opinion had largely forgiven her.
Her short life had been difficult: her mother was addicted to drugs, and her father had been in prison and would later die of a drug overdose. But this became part of her story of triumph. Her death from cervical cancer at the age of 27 – she learned the diagnosis the year before, when she was appearing in the Indian version of Big Brother – was shocking, and felt like a tragically wrong ending for, to use the reality show term, her “journey”.
Just as her life had been, her last months were documented, sometimes with appalling prurience, but usually with Goody’s involvement. “All she wanted was for her sons to have a good upbringing and never want for anything,” says Cave, who knew Goody and was her biographer. “She tried to save all the money she earned for them to have the education she never had. Right up until her death, the reason she was always selling her story was to make money for her family. I’m not sure how well advised she was, but her intentions were clear – she was single-minded about everything being about them, and for them.”
Goody died in 2009, when Bobby was just five, leaving him and Freddie with Jeff, who had come to fame on the 2001 show Shipwrecked. The couple had split up shortly after Freddie was born. Jeff has credited his mum with helping to raise the children, and, later, his wife, Kate Dwyer. He continued to work as a TV presenter, and became a life coach and mental health campaigner, embracing spiritual philosophy, which has been a clear influence on his son. In an interview with the Face last year, Bobby said he started most mornings with a reading from a book of spiritual teachings, breathing exercises and meditation. In an interview in September, not much had changed. “Sometimes my life becomes surrounded by meditation, and every day is one big meditation,” he said. “Other times I get wrapped into living through Bobby Brazier … Bobby Brazier is a role and a body and whatnot. And I’m the awareness of that.”
Brazier’s likability is partly because he seems so unselfconscious, even when going into his woo-woo interests. This seems to have more in common with his mother’s era of fame than the more cynical brand-building exercises of today’s blossoming celebrities. “I think what’s appealing about him is what appealed about his mother, which is a sort of ingenue innocence,” says the journalist Jacques Peretti, author of Edge of Reality: Journeys Through the Rabbit Hole of Reality Television. Cave agrees: “Jade wore her heart on her sleeve and was unflinchingly honest at all times – she never once pretended to be anyone she wasn’t. She would ask questions constantly, like a five-year-old trying to understand the world.”
The celebrities who do well, says the PR expert Mark Borkowski, are those who are authentic. “Whatever you say about his mum, she was what she was, and it got her into trouble accordingly.” As for Brazier, he has what Borkowski calls “‘the stuff’ – a natural ability to communicate. Other people have to have it trained in them, and of course we see that inauthenticity.” It happens particularly in politics, he says, but also in entertainment. Brazier, though, is “this slightly gauche, naive and beautifully optimistic human being, and people find him naturalistic. When people are trying to project something that they aren’t, that’s when it goes wrong. He’s gloriously honest at this stage.”
Shows such as Strictly are carefully cast, Borkowski points out, and Brazier has wide appeal. He has been building an Instagram profile since he began modelling at 16. He was spotted in a coffee shop with his dad, having a talk about his suspension from school. He left education and went on to work for big fashion houses, including Dolce & Gabbana.
Younger Strictly viewers may have no knowledge of who Goody was and simply respond to his puppyish energy. For those of us who remember his mum and see, with a jolt, his resemblance to her, there is a nostalgia. “For me, it almost feels like a happy ending,” says Peretti. “I know that sounds strange, but if you look at the tale of Jade and Jeff and their children, and you see a lovely young man, you think it is all right and actually the reality story doesn’t always have to end in damage.”
Goody, he says, and others of that first generation of reality stars, “were working-class people who television was taking in order to basically exploit them, to laugh at what they considered their stupidity, and their narrow-mindedness and prejudices. And actually, they were the complete opposite. Jade became loved by the nation.” With Goody, and others such as Kerry Katona and Katie Price, “the machine can easily spit you out, and you’ve got to learn to use it for your own ends”.
When those early series of Big Brother aired, says Peretti, social mobility was declining, even if the show offered the illusion of a meritocracy, “that you could still make it, everyone’s equal in the Big Brother house, whether you’re posh or you’re Jade”. If the offspring of those early reality stars are now leapfrogging off their parents’ fame, says Peretti, “I think there’s something totally valid about it. We live in a class-ridden society more than ever. What is wrong with children of reality stars going up the career ladder, and using the fame of their parents, any more than Prince William? There’s no difference.”
As for the future, Brazier’s charisma, positivity and humility are all good signs for a successful career, says Ruth Deller, a reader in media and communications at Sheffield Hallam University. “He has a really nice, sunny, warm personality, a cheeky sense of humour, is very affable, and all of those qualities will stand him in good stead, whereas other celebrities’ children could easily come across as talentless or spoilt.”
There is an element of class in Brazier’s relatability. He is undoubtedly privileged – he has been privately educated – but he hasn’t moved into a different social class from those of us who bought tabloids and magazines to read about his mum, in the way that other celebrities’ children have. Brazier has spoken of feeling out of place at his independent school (he left briefly to go to a state school, then returned), because of his Essex accent and awareness that “everyone comes from the same generationally rich families but my parents didn’t”.
Privilege would not have insulated Brazier from the pain of growing up without his mother, but his father’s approach to parenting – emotionally available, with an emphasis on mental health – has been praised, including by Bobby, who credited his dad in his NTA acceptance speech. Peretti describes it as “modern fathering”.
More than 20 years on from those first big reality shows, we are likely to start seeing more children of reality stars coming through, claiming their own fame. Reality stars – or at least the ones who share their lives in public – are distinct from other celebs, says Deller, because “your brand is your life, and if your real life includes children, then they are going to be part of your brand”.
“It’s the never-ending narrative,” says Peretti. But he adds there is something about Brazier that “feels sort of genuine”. On Strictly he brings joy, and nobody can begrudge him his own happiness. However long or successful his career turns out to be, we can feel the sadness that his mother isn’t here to see it. “I think Bobby is pretty special,” says Cave. “There is a sparkle that feels like he’s someone unique, just like his mum.”
