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.
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 – alongside her four siblings and their magisterial mother Tina – in the new reality series Secret Lives of Gypsy Wives. Trewley describes the clan as “like the Kardashians if they were broke! If the Kardashians were fat and on benefits!” Which is fair comment, but they are also like the Kardashians if Kris’s pod people had a sense of humour, irrepressible energy, charm and an abundance of affection for each other. I cannot imagine Khloé replying to an inquiry from Kim about what she’s done to prepare for their mother’s birthday with a cheery “More than what you’ve done, fatty!” as Trewley does to brother Jamie.
Trewley, Jamie, Honey, Ruby-Anne and Pearlygirl grew up as part of a traditional Traveller family – ruled by the patriarch, wives expected to cook, clean and have babies, daughters expected to grow up and do likewise – 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 – much to the perturbation of his father, Sidney – eschewed the trad life and became an estate agent and remains just as close to his family in every sense as the rest.
Sidney died less than three years ago and they are all still clearly devastated by the loss. “I can’t talk,” says Trewley, as she begins to describe it. “I feel like I’m in a different world.” They still buy presents from him for Tina on her birthday. “To my Teenie,” runs the accompanying message on Trewley’s. “Happy birthday, old girl. Thank you for looking after our babies. I love you in this life and the next.” The whole family falls silent for a moment in their shared grief. “That’s lovely, Trew,” says her brother approvingly. Then, nodding towards mum, who is having a good cry, “You’ve ruined the whole day.” The family erupts once more. Life goes on.
Even in the middle of sorrow, however, Trewley is beginning to see that her father’s absence may create more freedom for her to realise her non-traditional ambitions. For Trewley – then just 25 – does not want, yet at least, to be a wife or mother. “I want an empire.” Brand collaborations are beginning to come in and money is being made, though she, quite rightly, won’t say how much.
She also wants a belly button piercing, but this – along with tattoos on women – is a Traveller no-no. “Your mum will fucking rip it out of you,” says Trewley’s 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’s only a slight exaggeration – Tina actually just throws her out of the house until the piercing is removed. Trewley is staying the course on the empire thing though.
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, “When Dad died, everyone [on the estate] was waiting for their benefits to hit so they could buy us milk.” That there are limits to the benefits of comradeship itself is also clear. “You either stay on that estate and slowly die or you go to prison,” Trewley states, matter-of-factly, during one of the solo interviews to camera with which the more raucous family scenes are intercut: “And I don’t want that for my life.”
Trewley’s 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’s story is anything to go by, however, we will have to hope very hard indeed.
-
Secret Lives of Gypsy Wives is on Channel 4 now.
