Times2
Hey, big spenders: show a little taste
Joe Joseph
Aimi Robinson, a 31-year-old lap dancer with a mouth so swollen with collagen that she makes Angelina Jolie look thin-lipped, was introduced to us in Britain’s Biggest Spenders (ITV1) as a “compulsive spender who’s spending more than she earns to become the next Jordan”.
What? It’s a phrase that jangles in your eardrum. As with a Spoonerism, it takes a second for your brain to decode what is amiss. Then it clicks: it’s the phrase, “. . . who’s spending more than she earns to become the next Jordan”. Isn’t that like saying, “who’s spending more than she earns to become the next personal masseur to Michael Moore”? Or, “who’s spending more thanshe earns to become Michael Jackson’s next PR spokesperson”? Who craves such things?
But then Britain’s Biggest Spenders wasn’t a documentary about the quietly wealthy. It was a modern-day Victorian freak show. You could see what might be in it for Robinson: she has debts of £90,000 and a delusion that she’ll become a rich celebrity by attending Z-list parties wearing very little. Exposure on primetime television, she must have calculated, could only help.
Lisa Voice, another of the documentary’s subjects, has an expensive project to finance and plug. Once married to Billy Fury, Voice has led a colourful, and occasionally tragic, life, which she now hopes to turn into a movie with Renée Zellweger and Johnny Depp playing the leads.
But if you have any idea what persuaded Scott Alexander to take part in this film, then chances are your name is Scott Alexander. Alexander, 31, is a former personal trainer with Popeye muscles who now boasts: “I don’t know anyone who spends more money than me.” He spends £100,000 a month; much of it at Dolce and Gabbana, and presumably a large part of the balance on maintaining his crème brûlée tan.
“There’s not anything that I’ve seen that I can’t obtain. And if it’s something that I can’t obtain, then the foot goes on the accelerator and I will get it.” Hands up who is impressed by this kind of talk? No, put your hand down, Scott: I’m asking everyone else.
Alexander can take comfort in his bank balance. But Aimi? “I’m kind of hoping,” she confides as the programme ends, with her still no closer to wooing the paparazzi than Joan Rivers is to winning Facelift of the Year, “that this time next year, hopefully, you never know, I might be a celebrity. I might be really rich, might be living with David Beckham, might be in a nice big castle. I might even have my own TV show.”
Ah, there it is again, the now familiar mantra of every Big Brother housemate and of every talentless, deluded reality show contestant. It’s the modern version of the Wild West gold prospector’s dream of striking it rich just by staking a claim and hoping.